Myth, the Universe, and Everything

I've written here about using a few different goals strategies, and about how I particularly liked devonmonk's reasonable goals combined with above-and-beyond-the-call-of-duty goals, as it's encouraging to land somewhere in the middle. I decided to set some for the summer, thanks to kaz_mahoney's Summer Camp. She's doing a writing goals thing (not a challenge, as that sounds too competitive) for the summer months, with a Tuesday check in, starting next week.



To share with you all, here are my summer writing goals:

Reasonable goal:
* With my cowriter, finish the draft of our serial novel. (We're at chapter 10 of 20 -- halfway there!)
* Complete typesetting on four essays written by other authors (this is contracted, so it's kinda cheating to count it).
* Write one short story.
* Write multiple book reviews (not contracted, but already arranged with the venues in which they'll appear).

Extended goal:
All of the above, plus:
* Write three chapters of the YA novel I'm working on.
* Write three short stories (including the one above).
* Restart the adult novel I haltingly began last year now that it's percolated and I have an idea of where it's going.
* Blog at least three times a week.

If you're looking for motivation, do check out Kaz's Summer Camp and join us!

Getting ready for the trip, I'm back to reading Barfield, hoping I'll be able to finish it before I meet up with the students in the airport, since they'll all be much fresher with it than I am. I've also been thinking a lot about subcreation from the perspective of Tolkien, since that's one of the topics I'm writing about soon for Journey to the Sea, and have been pondering my long WIP (the one I just started randomly and haven't yet gotten back to), in which some writers can exert their will over reality.

All of these thoughts were in my head when I picked up Lavinia, by Ursula K. Le Guin on my lunch break today, and the first few paragraphs hit home, so I wanted to share them here. I've long admired Le Guin's work (one of my favorite essays in college was a response, in Le Guin's style, to "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"), though I've not read as much of it as, perhaps, I should have. At any rate, here is the opening; I hope you'll see why it intertwined so easily with my thoughts.

--

I know who I was, I can tell you who I may have been, but I am, now, only in this line of words I write. I'm not sure of the nature of my existence, and wonder to find myself writing. I speak Latin, of course, but did I ever learn to write it? That seems unlikely. No doubt someone with my name, Lavinia, did exist, but she may have been so different from my own idea of myself, or my poet's idea of me, that it only confuses me to think about her. As far as I know, it was my poet who gave me any reality at all. Before he wrote, I was the mistiest of figures, scarcely more than a name in a genealogy. It was he who brought me to life, to myself, and so made me able to remember my life and myself, which I do, vividly, with all kinds of emotions, emotions I feel as strongly as I write, perhaps because the events I remember only come to exist as I write them, or as he wrote them.

but he did not write them. He slighted my life, in his poem. He scanted me, because he only came to know who I was when he was dying. He's not to blame. It was too late for him to make amends, rethink, complete the half lines, perfect the poem he thought imperfect. He grieved for that, I know; he grieved for me. Perhaps where he is now, down there across the dark rivers, somebody will tell him that Lavinia grieves for him.