Friday, April 1, 2011

CEDA

Sorry, fellow Left 4 Dead fans, but this isn’t a post about the Civil Emergency and Defense Agency in the game. But eventually I’ll probably blog about the awesomeness that is Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2.
CEDA (Create Every Day in April) is simply my version of BEDA (Blog Every Day in April) that the awesome YA author Maureen Johnson started in 2009. You can check out Maureen’s initial post here.
Why Create and not Blog?
For starters, I’m still getting used to not cringing every time I see blog used as a verb. But I’m not the grammar police, because if I was I’d have already been picked up by Internal Affairs for my past abuse and misuse of commas.
Midway through the writing version of March Madness, I realized that I seriously needed to work on changing my writing habits. I’ve been a longtime spurter*, and it’s way past time for a change. Or at least, time to try a new approach.
By calling it CEDA instead of BEDA, I can continue my March Madness goals to keep working on my writing by actually writing; be it my YA WIP, the Script Frenzy project that I’m working on with my friend and writing partner, Jenn, my blog, or something else that just can’t wait to be written. (My characters from other works seem to like to make sudden appearances when I’m trying to fall asleep and rattle off epically awesome pieces of inner monologue, description, etc. I think I need to put new batteries in my tape recorder, because by the time I grab my cell or notebook, the words don’t appear so epically awesome. Well, most of the time they are still epically awesome, just epically awesome piles of crap.)
CEDA’s focus is to allow myself to focus on daily writing while not limiting myself to just one project. After all, writers actually write instead of just talking about writing. And I am a writer. I will write every day. I will get the words on paper. I will, in the words of the great Nike slogan; Just do it.
My goals for CEDA:
Write 1-2 chapters in my YA WIP.
Complete a 100 page screenplay with Jenn for Script Frenzy
Write and post 10-15 blog entries.
And because I'm such a geek for statistics, I made a spreadsheet to keep track of my total words/pages. Based on previous chapters, screenplays, and blogs; I estimate I'll see about 35,000 words. Now just to find someone willing to give me a dollar a word. I'd even settle for a penny a word.

* I should really get off my high horse about blog as a verb, because here I am using a rare noun form of the word spurt.