How do you write? When do you do it? How do you know what to do? I’m always curious to find out how other writers approach writing. It’s one of the reasons I love memoirs on writing –Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft is one of my favorites. While no two people are likely to have exactly the same way of going about things, I’m curious about how people do it and from all of the questions people ask me, I find they’re curious about what I’m doing too.

So I’ve starting tracking my current writing practices. I’ll share them with you as well as the discoveries I make about my writing patterns, routines I’d like to create, and tasks I need to add. I’ll do a summary report once a week usually. To start though, here are the last couple of weeks. In future process posts, I will include more about the time of day I was working, how long things took, and what things I’m noticing or want to tweek. so that my picture of my process is more detailed.

Sunday, August 30th - Totally rethought the focus and goals of this site.

Monday, August 31st – Moved posts from sonyafeher.com to mamatrue.com, my parenting blog

Thursday, September 3rd

• Submitted to Gargoyle magazine. Poets & Writers listed September 4th as the deadline. I went to their website and the editors had a note that the latest issue was almost full but they still needed short pieces. I submitted five short poems online.
• I printed out poems and cover letter to send to Lilliput Review, a publication I was featured in years ago and thought had stopped publishing. It turned out they just hadn’t had much of a web presence and still only accept snail mail submissions. I’d sent in one submission, received a rejection with encouragement to send more poems. They only accept poems that are 10 lines or less and you can send in up to nine at a time, which is amazing since most places only accept 3 -5 poems at once. Serendipitously, I had nine more poems that were that short. I printed them three to a page as suggested in submission guidelines and put them in an enveloped to be mailed on the 4th.

Friday, September 4th

• Mailed Lilliput Review submission
• While our part-time nanny spent three hours with my son, I wrote a blog post then went bead shopping. Doing other creative work outside of the realm of words often frees me up to write more and not have the editor so engaged.

Saturday, September 5th – Received nice note from Gargolye editor that they were already full with dates for next submission period.

Sunday September 6th – Wrote three blogs posts on new format for website and scheduled them for subsequent days so I wouldn’t add all the content at once and people could read it in the order I intended.

Tuesday, September 8th

• Published one of the blog posts I’d written on the 6th.
• Wrote post on morning and evening routines with kids for mamatrue.
• Shared link for both posts on through Twitter and Facebook in separate updates.
• Started post on my poetry submission process.
• Met with Mastermind group and learned that I should have Creative Commons licenses on my web content.
• Started reading journal to decide if my poems would fit the market. Too tired. Added date to my Yahoo calendar so I’ll read it later.

Wednesday, September 9th

• Wrote book review blog post for my book challenge and fed it to Facebook and Twitter
• Added new page to website with Feminista’s Top 100 books by women. I realized I was sending traffic to a library’s website and it was always possile they’d take the content down. Also, having the information on my site allows me to format it with progress updates for my book challenge.
• Set up Creative Commons licenses on both my website and blog

Thursday, September 10th

• Received acceptance for a poem from Literary Mama — woo hoo! This is a market I’d known I wanted to be published in since I found out about them while i was pregnant. They emailed to say the poem would be published in the October 4th  Returned publication contract.
• After my son went to sleep, I wrote ablog post for mamatrue.

Friday, September 11th – Wrote blog post for this site and finished up last of 5 part series on night weaning on mamatrue

Saturday, September 12th - Talked to a bunch of my mama buddies about my book challenge. and invited them to join me. I also asked for suggestions for the top 100 list I’m creating.

Monday, September 14th

• This is the one week a month I moderate posts as a contributing editor for API Speaks. I edit posts for grammar and content then add tags and categories and schedule them as well approving comments. I scheduled one post, saw there were many more to be read, and added Blog Moderating to my calendar for the 15th.
• Responded to comments on my mamatrue blog.
• Went through my submission calendar and moved dates tasks I hadn’t completed to future dates.

Tuesday, September 15th

• Read five posts for API Speaks, edited and scheduled them for publication.
• Corresponded with representative from a website that has been using some of my posts from mamatrue. They’re changing their practices and want to know if I’m still interested in working with them. I asked for more clarification.
• Sent letter to editor of online magazine I’m supposed to be starting monthly column for. Asked for more details and dates.
• Wrote and published this then fed it to Twitter and Facebook

Let me know what kind of details you’re looking for. How can my evaluating my writing process help you?