May’s Month of Music

The A to Z Challenge was fun and as I already said yesterday I plan to keep up with posting as much as possible this month. In fact here’s what my calendar looks like right now:



Aw, it looks so fresh and clean and optimistic right now!



It should resemble April with all the check marks and notes by the time we roll into June:



And everything got a checkmark. Boom!



Anyway, you see that coded writing all over my calendar? Well each set of initials represents the project I’m working on during May. Back in April I had each letter of the alphabet on the particular day of the week I was supposed to blog and each was checked off once completed.

So what does my code mean? Since this is kind of the central hub of all my endeavors I suppose it can’t hurt to fill everyone in on what is it I’d say I do here. This blog is the center of the wheel. The space where all my other personalities, er, um, projects, branch out from. And I have a really strong month planned so I can’t wait to get it underway. Oh wait, I’m doing that right now!

But I digress…back to my not so cryptic code…

RL – Randomness and Lunacy. I have seventeen spaces allotted for posting on this blog during May. Not as much as April but that’s okay. I think this will be easier to keep up with while still increasing over what I was doing all winter (read: not a whole lot).

JFS – Jenn Flynn-Shon website. Since I really use the blog you’re reading right now as my primary virtual soapbox, I don’t update my Author website too often. Once a month should be enough to give a brief career-only type update.

Writesy – Writesy Press. Twice during May I’m going to get something Writerly out there. I’m kicking around book reviews, more writing tips, interviews with Authors I know and a few other writing-only type updates.

GLR – Green Leaf Reviewer. It’s baaaaack……… My long dormant eco-blog is back up and rolling again. I think I started posting over there again this past February. I was finding so much Green news in my local paper and all over Phoenix that it seemed like a good time to give the planet a little bit of love again. But twice a month should work for now. I’m just looking to build the current portfolio and keep the peeps informed.

RAII – The sequel to Reckless Abandon is still on my radar and I’ve got about 15k words already invested so I’m going to get back to work making that a little longer, more polished and complete. My self-imposed deadline for the complete edited first draft is Tuesday June 11. I think having five days in May to work on plot, outline and word count should produce anywhere from 1000 to 2500 words a day. By the end of May I’ll have a jumbled mess to mold during the first two weeks of June.

TFTM – Trying for the Moon edits and revisions should be done by the end of the month. I also have to pick a theme, a tone, and start grouping each of the poems under the right chapter headings. Then I’ll need an introduction, table of contents, acknowledgements page, and chapter briefs. I don’t actually plan to have this finished until mid-summer so four days seemed like enough time this month to dedicate to this project.

And last but certainly not in the least bit least…

YDAS – This is a project that it’s safe to say is my longest running so far. It’s getting up on forty years in fact. I haven’t hashed out all the details yet but this is going to be a memoir or something in that realm; creative non-fiction. I got most of the introduction written a couple days ago and I’m in love with it. Because it’s just me. Honest and real and in your face direct from the inner depths of my head.

I posted during the A to Z challenge that I was tired of being afraid of writing what I really wanted to say when I talked about overcoming setbacks. With that post still stewing in my mind I set out to get the beginning stages of this hashed out. With memoir/creative non-fiction there’s a lot of different kinds of work to do from that of constructing fiction. The storyline is already set because I already lived it. The trick is making that story cohesive and only including what really needs to be said in order to tell the base story. No filler or it doesn’t work for the reader.

But you can bet your ass the voice you read over here at this blog is going to be the same one you’re getting with this new book. In fact there are some stories I’ve written here that I plan to snag, expand, etc. and incorporate into the book. Many things I’ve written about over here will work within the confines of a memoir. This one in particular.

Oh, and yes it is on purpose that I haven’t revealed the name just yet. I’ve reserved the url (did that about six months ago in fact) but only have the first 3400 words written right now so it’s still a little too early to put it all out there just yet. Needless to say I’m giving myself four days this month to be that person during the day and I think that’s plenty.

Especially since I have seventeen others to basically be the same person. Me. My voice, my snarky attitude toward life and its many head-shaking moments.

It’s going to be really nice to spend this entire month doing not much more than writing.

But anyway, I said in the title it’s going to be a month of music. So let me explain.

For Randomness and Lunacy I really liked the idea of last month’s theme. It helped me to stay on track with writing because it limited the countless options down to a single suggestion – the day’s letter. Well I’m a music lover and each morning after I ride my bike to work (four miles every morning on the stationary bike in the living room “gets” me to work every day!) I boot up the computer so I can get my music playing.

During May I’m going to try to write something either directly related to, inspired by, or fictionalized from the first song that comes up in my playlist every morning. Obviously you won’t know if I’m just forwarding songs to get to something that sparks some creativity but I can assure you fine readers that I’m unlikely to do so. The point of this is to push myself to see what kind of creativity comes out under a more stringent guideline.

I want this exercise to help me uncover stories -

Did I spend time with someone and that song was playing? Was this song on during a time I got dumped? Was I still a smoker when this song came out and did I still smoke in my house while writing? How many times did my sister and I try to make up a dance for this one? How embarrassing was it to do that dance in front of the hottest guy in the neighborhood? What kind of smell does this song bring back to mind – was it summer or winter? Do I have nothing in the memory banks for this song so I have to write a fictional piece inspired by the words and lyrics?

And so on.

So starting tomorrow prepare for the onslaught of ‘who knows what might come out of my head’ because ‘who knows what might come out of my speakers’.

May’s Month of Music