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As a general rule, I don't care for readings. You know, the whole listening to someone read out loud thing. Lectures I can get into sometimes. I've been known to enjoy a few minutes of a talking head TV show while on a stationary bike. Radio interviews, okay. But I can't remember a time when I've gone to a public place to listen to writers read from their work when I haven't been left thinking, How soon can I get out of here? soon after I took my seat. I much prefer to read the piece, myself. Plus the atmosphere is often very pompous and humorless at book readings, and they tend to go on and on. I missed a chance to hear Christopher Moore read at UConn several years ago. His writing is funny, and I probably would have liked that. When I saw Margo Lanagan in person, she kept her readings, and the whole event, short. That was more than three years ago, and I'm still talking about it.

I start with all that to make clear how taken I am with the literary series described in A New Burlington Writers' Co-op Debuts a Literary Series, in one of my favorite Vermont publications, Seven Days. Susan Weiss, one of the members of the writers' co-op that sponsors the series says the co-op was formed, among other reasons, because "I wanted to find ways to be a writer within the community, not just when I’m sitting at my computer."

Ah, community. In this case, Weiss isn't just talking about community for writers, but writers becoming part of the greater community.

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Yes, I was talking about unit end recapitulation last Tuesday. Not to worry. I'm not talking about recapitulation in the sense of "recalling a charged event" and "feeling remorse if appropriate." I'm talking about what I did and how successful I feel I was with it. Because that will be a factor in my planning for next year.

Time Management Tuesday

I managed a Time Management Tuesday post, every single Tuesday. Even during Retreat Week. Even on Christmas Day. In terms of managing time and perseverance, terrific. But did it do me any good in terms of work?

First off, my time management research last year led me to submit a workshop proposal to the New England SCBWI for its spring conference. It was accepted, and I will be teaching a Situational Time Management workshop that weekend. I have spoken at professional conferences before, even at a writers' retreat. This is the first regional conference.

Secondly, I have been using the unit system (which has evolved a lot since I first wrote about it back in February), transitional time, and constant planning to manage my time.

Which leads us to...

The Saving the Planet E-book Edition

Preparing this e-book has been hugely time consuming for both my computer guy and myself. I will go into his work at some other time. I spent huge amounts of time seeking out and planning ways to publicize the book. The unit system and constant planning (see above) were significant here, because for many months I was working part-time. Planning units for the various research helped to make good use of the time I did have. Given that I often had only two days a week and that they were frequently Mondays and Fridays, trying to get into a big writing project might have been extremely difficult. So this was a good use of the time I had. But the fact that it took up so much time will definitely influence what I do next year.

Submission Binge

I did a binge of submitting short stories and essays early in the year, which resulted in a short story being accepted for publication at Alimentum. Again, that will have an impact on my plans for next year.

The NESCBWI Blog Tour 

This is a little project I assigned myself last year and finished this year. This was worthwhile for a couple of reasons. It provided content for Original Content, of course, but was also a community building effort before I even got into building community. (See below.) I friended some of the bloggers on Facebook and made connections of one kind or another. And it could have an impact on my planning for next year.

May Days

Last year I took part in a Facebook event called May Days, which was sort of like binge writing for a specific unit of time. I wasn't prepared for the project, so I just wrote two pages of anything every day. At least one piece I worked on was reworked this fall into a press release for Saving the Planet & Stuff. Again, this will be coming up again during my planning for next year.

Community Building

When you consider how late in the year I became interested in community building, I managed to do quite a bit with it--at least, by my standards. The Connecticut Children's Lit Calendar, the weekend reading roundups, and the Next Big Thing Author Meme, which I expect to be posting next weekend, all involve community building. I've also been more conscientious about taking part in the Carnival of Children's Books this past year and have taken part in the Carnival of Creativity a couple of times. How will community building figure in to my plans for next year?

Not only are these the bigger projects I've been involved with this past year, they're the projects I've written about here at Original Content. I'll use them as examples for next week's Time Management Tuesday post.

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For the last few months, I've been interested in community building, by which I mean a creative, professional community related to writing. You will recall, I am sure, that what got me started on this was the Crafting a Public Identity Workshop I attended in September. Artist Sharon Butler discussed her commitment to becoming part of an arts community that was apart from her own art career. The experience of being part of the community was valuable in and of itself, but it also ended up helping her professionally.

Butler talked about how the Internet and social media helped with her community building. She was talking primarily about her blog, Two Coats of Paint. This blog can be found plenty of places on-line, but the "reviews, commentary, news, and background information about painting and related subjects" that Butler says Two Coats of Paint is about, seem to all be generated at the blog. The blog is the center of her creative community building.

So I've been working on building a writers' community here at Original Content. I got started with The Connecticut Children's Lit Calendar, which is all about building professional community here in this state. The various weekend reading roundups (which I should provide with a consistent name) are about rebuilding the on-line community I was part of years ago. My portion of the Next Big Thing Author Meme, which I'm still pulling together, is about writers helping writers and building professional community in that way.

Here's the thing with community building--it is hugely time consuming. It takes a lot of time to do it, and it takes a long while for the work to pay off, either in terms of becoming part of a community or in terms of the community providing any kind of help for a career.

In my experience, community needs to be more than just joining Facebook or a few other "people pools." I don't see a lot of "professional" interaction at Facebook. Writers network their blog posts or make announcements regarding their work, but lots of that just drops with no response. There's not a lot of the "commentary, news, and background information" that Butler describes in the "About" section of her blog. Goodreads, my other social media spot, is primarily lists of books read by members. Not much discussion of those. Writers on Goodreads will often network the same blog posts they've put up everywhere else. Again, not that much reaction. So while joining places like that is easy and posting doesn't take much time (especially if you're not putting up much besides your blog posts), I don't see how anyone can get a real feeling of community there.

There also may not be a lot of interest in real community building among some types of professionals, writers in particular. Artists like Butler have a very public face. Their work has to be shown somehow in order for people to see it. Artists have to get the work out there somehow, have to click with the galleries and groups that show art. They have to meet with people. That is less of an issue with writers. Yes, we have to market, and we have to spend more and more time doing that. But because in publishing there's what I call the "opening weekend" model for new books, writers sort of binge market when a book comes out and then disappear.

A lot of what we do is hit and run. Marketing is hit and run. Submitting is hit and run. Getting a first draft done is hit and run. Community needs to be maintained regularly. We don't work at anything regularly.

I'm a bit obsessive and recognize that there are no short cuts for most things in life, so I'll continue working on community for... mmm...maybe another half year? But any kind of community I manage to create is going to have to be one that can be managed in a time efficient way.

I've already started working on next month's Connecticut Children's Lit Calendar.

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You may recall that about a month ago I was showing an interest in becoming part of a creative community. Just now I was visiting a Modest Money  (it was part of a web marketing carnival I was checking out), and in one of the blogger's posts, he recognized all the bloggers who had mentioned him recently. I thought, That sounds like community building. So I'm going to do it here every now and then.

I have two blogs I can mention:

The Author Chronicles,  which included me in a recent Top Picks Thursday post.

Connecticut Bloggers, where I am now a contributor for the Connecticut Children's Literature Calendars.

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