Monday, June 22, 2009

Come SWIMming - the water's fine!

With its extra-long days, summer holds so much potential for new projects. The summer begins with so many good intentions and lofty goals for our spare time, and then when autumn begins we wonder where we spent all that time we seemed to have because the projects are not completed and the goals are not met. This is particularly true of writing, which comes straight from the blood and sweat of our souls and fingertips. Come fall, when we discover that we have left these creative expressions behind we can feel guilty, dissatisfied, wasteful.

This summer is different.


Today, the first day after the summer solstice, the Lit-tastic Revisionista and I are thrilled to announce SWIM: Summer Writing Inspiration Movement. This summer, we invite you to declare your writing goals out loud and mark their progress together with us in environment of summer fun, support and inspiration. Whether your writing is personal or professional, full time or spare time, we invite you to join SWIM!

What makes SWIM different from a traditional writing group is that it is not limited to one particular form of writing. Creative writing, academic writing, journaling, blogging, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, mission statements, personal manifestos - whatever you write or want to write, you are welcome here. Every writing goal is equal at SWIM, and with that equality we hope to draw inspiration from the diversity of our group's ambitions.

On Mondays, we will be posting our writing goals for the week and reminding ourselves of the larger goals in the pipeline. On Fridays, we will be posting a check-in with our progress. During the week, we'll be leaving comments on SWIM members' posts with encouragement and ideas. It's that simple!

Summer writing intentions:
*Generate a full draft of my dissertation (3 chapters remaining)
*Produce two conference papers
*Complete "The Artist's Way" creativity course

This week's intentions:
*Draft all unwritten and scattered sections of "Studio" chapter.
*Write three full B5 morning pages each day.

Come SWIMming! The water's fine!

Dateline: Salcombe, Devon, UK

4 comments:

  1. woohoo! love the energy!

    good luck with the Studio chapter.

    I think I'm going to join you in the Morning Pages writing~~it's been a while since I've done them, so it'll be good to give them another go to see what else is lurking in my subconscious :)

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  2. I am also reading 'The Artist Way', so it'll be interesting to know and share how we get on.

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  3. nice! i'm back to morning pages, but not yet 3 pages (and my journal is small-ish). next week i'll bump it up to 3--for this week 2 is okay.

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  4. I'm trying so hard for three pages each morning, but things just keep getting in the way - like my other writing! I'm trying to keep my personal and professional writing balanced as priorities, but the dissertation really has to come first...

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