EmmieB:

1) ultimate goal?

To send out a completed draft of my book (a memoir that is part family history part travel story) with accompanying book proposal/cover letter to literary agents by summer 2010.

2) How far into your current project are you?

I completed a full first draft in late April 2008 (approx. 2.5 weeks before DD was born) and have revised the first chapter or so since. There are a few other chapters that I have had published in literary magazines that are in pretty good shape, but I need to make sure the overall book flows. (Some chapters are still kind of a mess.) Oh, and I need a title! Naming my baby was easier than naming my book.

3) Set your own deadlines based on your current project.

Everything is researched and written and most of it has even been workshopped, but I would love new sets of eyes. I am in the revision stage right now. Would like to be done with the total revision within the next 6 months. I would love to set deadlines to send chapters out to people so that I can get moving on actually doing revisions.

4)  What do you hope to achieve working with a writing group that you don't think you can achieve on your own?

As stated above, I have workshopped a lot of this already, but am always eager to get new eyes to look at it. I have been working on this project since 2003, so I feel like it's very hard for me to step back and evaluate what's working and what's not, especially overall. There are definitely parts of the book that I think don't necessarily link well together and I also wonder whether there are overall questions a reader would have that I leave unanswered by the end.

5) Do you have any special requests from the group? 

I am super open to constructive criticism, but please be cognizant of criticizing the writing v. the person since it is a memoir and I expose a lot about myself (ie, "I can't believe you did that" is not as helpful as "that situation doesn't make sense as written/I am confused about your motivation here.")

6) Tell us a little something about yourself - your experience, your literary tastes, your influences (literary or not) 

I have been writing fiction, poetry and non-fiction since I was very young, but have mostly been focusing on non-fiction in the last few years. I have been working on the current book for almost 7 years, have published parts of it in literary magazines and am very serious about seeing this project through to completion.

I also work as a literary translator and had three translations of novels from Spanish and Portuguese published this year by major publishing houses. I am happy to advise people on the ins and outs of the literary world since I have gone through the selling and editing process on the books I've translated and have worked very closely with the authors of these books.

I have too many favorite authors to name and hate when I am asked to make a list! Off the top of my head, some of my favorite books are One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Bell Jar, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Troubling Love, The Days of Abandonment, The Halfway House, 2666 and almost anything else by Roberto Bolano, Crime and Punishment and lots of other books about love, war, angst, suicide, complicated family histories, politics and its effect on personal lives, etc. I also really like and admire journalists like Philip Gourevitch (his book about Rwanda is really, really incredible), Lawrence Weschler, Alma Guillermoprieto, Jon Lee Anderson and George Packer. I also like to read cookbooks for fun, not just for directions.

EmmieB:

Ok - this was the first thing that I thought about - we should all set and clearly state out intentions. I'm giving us a Jan 4 deadline for this because that will get us through the holidays and into the new year.

It's probably best that we don't think of these as "resolutions" because that's like an invitation to break them.

So:

1) What is your ultimate goal? My goal is pretty simple. I want to start writing again! I haven't done any writing in over a year. I've read nothing but books on babies, breastfeeding, and labor!

2) How far into your current project are you? I have several short stories that I've started and never finished. Sadly, I don't have a current project and will be starting fresh.

3) Set your own deadlines based on your current project. (Items to consider: research, outline, rough draft, multiple revisions, peer reviews, submission to desired recipient.) Hmmm...I don't want to set a deadline yet! I would love to get started on something.

4)  What do you hope to achieve working with a writing group that you don't think you can achieve on your own? (Try to identify your own weaknesses here. I'm sure that a lot of you will agree with me that this group will help motivate us to meet our own deadlines and write more frequently.) I have no problem starting projects. However, I hit a certain point and stop. I don't know where to go and could use some motivation and advice on where to take the piece from that point.

5) Do you have any special requests from the group? 

6) Tell us a little something about yourself - your experience, your literary tastes, your influences (literary or not) It's been so long since I've read. It's sad. I am an English/Writing major. I have written short stories and several plays. In college, two of my plays were selected for performance. After college, I was a writer for a local newspaper. I wrote weekly feature stories on a wide variety of topics. My favorite book of all time is Gone with the Wind. I haev always enjoyed most everything written by Stephen King. I love Sylvia Plath and The Bell Jar. Other favorite include: House of Mirth, Of Mice and Men, The Hours, and To Kill a Mockingbird. I am currently reading A Confederacy of Dunces.

1) What is your ultimate goal? Get my novel re-written (I cut a good 30,000 words from the rough-draft. Decided I HATED the b-plot) and revised and to the consultant.

2) How far into your current project are you? The second-draft stage. I have the a-plot written, but the parts of the story that make it seem real and add depth and flavor are still missing.

3) Set your own deadlines based on your current project. (Items to consider: research, outline, rough draft, multiple revisions, peer reviews, submission to desired recipient.) I'm going to say that I'd like it to the consultant by the end of the summer. But I'm giving birth Monday so I'm not sure how realistic that is.

4)  What do you hope to achieve working with a writing group that you don't think you can achieve on your own? (Try to identify your own weaknesses here. I'm sure that a lot of you will agree with me that this group will help motivate us to meet our own deadlines and write more frequently.) Motivation to not procrastinate.

5) Do you have any special requests from the group? Patience :-)

6) Tell us a little something about yourself - your experience, your literary tastes, your influences (literary or not) I've known I wanted to write fiction since I was a very small child. Due to some bad counseling in high school and coming from a family of avid readers but no writers, I never knew quite how to get there. So now that I don't work out of the home anymore and I have a very supportive husband - and with the powers of the internet -I'm trying again. It's never too late to become who you were meant to be, eh? I read and write murder mysteries - they are my favorite. I'm fascinated with characters who aren't entirely nice but for some reason are still likeable (Think Dr. House and Dexter and U-Turn.) I'm also prone to being morbid and creepifying, which freaks some people out. I'm also not averse to talking about poop.  I have a book review blog where I review books I enjoyed - and a few that I didn't. 

So excited!

2) How far into your current project are you? Hm, about 36,000 words into my 2nd novel. I abandoned my first novel, it needed to much work and I wasn't really passionate about it the way I am with this one. Word count needs to be about 70,000 minimum so I am halfway there.

3) Set your own deadlines based on your current project. (Items to consider: research, outline, rough draft, multiple revisions, peer reviews, submission to desired recipient.) I would like to finish this novel (all revisions) by my birthday in April and snag a literary agent by summer.

4)  What do you hope to achieve working with a writing group that you don't think you can achieve on your own? (Try to identify your own weaknesses here. I'm sure that a lot of you will agree with me that this group will help motivate us to meet our own deadlines and write more frequently.) I love writing but I tend to put it off if I know I can't dedicate two or three hours at a time to it (and with a baby it's difficult/impossible to get that much time) and I need help motivating myself to just do it, even if it's only five minutes at a time.

5) Do you have any special requests from the group? Honesty & encouragement

6) Tell us a little something about yourself - your experience, your literary tastes, your influences (literary or not) I'm in a local writing group, I belong to 2 writing corporations and I also used to review books for an online literary magazine before it sort of went under...

My literary tastes, as in what I like to read, are a wide range from trashy romance (yeah, I admit it) to poetry to women's fiction. I love stories that take you to a different place or make you think about things differently. My writing began at age 14 though I was making up stories in my head as a kid. I started out writing poetry and that turned into novels and short stories. I would classify my genre as women's fiction- in the same genre as say, Jennifer Weiner or Jennie Shortridge. I write about real women struggling with the sort of things we all go through but with a grittier edge... 

I love that we have a group for this! I also think that we could do something like start a yahoo group or something so we have more freedom - I guess we can see how active we are.

1) What is your ultimate goal? To start writing creatively again. I write for work, but it is academic, technical, and PR type writing. It makes me want to stab my eyes out - I am much more fulfilled when I am writing something creative - I love writing fiction, but I also enjoy writing about my life and my opinion. I have started blogs, but get distracted too easily and I don't keep up with them.

2) How far into your current project are you? I'm not! I have a story line in my head, and its been there for a while - I just need to get it on paper.

3) Set your own deadlines based on your current project. (Items to consider: research, outline, rough draft, multiple revisions, peer reviews, submission to desired recipient.) My first deadline - I will try to get the opening scene on paper by January 19th.

4)  What do you hope to achieve working with a writing group that you don't think you can achieve on your own? (Try to identify your own weaknesses here. I'm sure that a lot of you will agree with me that this group will help motivate us to meet our own deadlines and write more frequently.) I can't stay motived, and I like to have an immediate audience. While I've written a lot on my own that no one ever read, I really started enjoying sharing my work in high school and college, and I LOVE feedback. I need constructive criticism. I can easily get off on a tangent in my writing. I would also like to have a group of people to turn to when I need help with grammar and usage! I don't know if anyone is into that, but I imagine there some grammar nerds in here, I hope :) Also, I'm better at imagining a scene but I'm not quite as good at moving the story along. I should probably be a song or poetry writer, but I keep trying to write stories!

5) Do you have any special requests from the group?  This isn't necessarily a special request, but when things are slow, I'm happy to do editing/copyediting. This is what I do for my job, and I will be happy to read something that is actually interesting.

6) Tell us a little something about yourself - your experience, your literary tastes, your influences (literary or not) I've read a lot of nonfiction in the last few years, but I love novels, and haven't read as much as I'd like. I like books that aren't all fantasy, but have an air of magic or fantasy to them. Alice Hoffman is one of my favorite writers. I also like books like Like Water for Chocolate and When the Elephants Dance. One of my favorites is The Red Tent - I love how the author took a small verse in the Bible and turned it into a novel from a completely different perspective. Beyond that - one of my degrees is a B.A. in Journalism, and my focus was Professional Writing (my other B.A. is anthropology). The professional writing classes killed my creativity for a long time. It was all about structure, writing for entertainment and just to make money (we "studied" books like Harry Potter, romance novels, and other stories that follow a form). Worst experience - it killed me as a writer. So now that I am a little further away from those classes, its easier for me to forget what I learned and get back to writing creatively without thinking about the "rules." I've written since I was a child - writing 35 page stories when I was in 3rd grade while my classmates' stories were about 2 pages. lol  I wrote poetry in high school and worked on our school's creative publication. In college, I ruined my writing, as I explained above, but I also found that I love memoir writing. I wrote for our school's website, and basically, wrote a blog but we didn't realize that's what we were doing then. I liked to write things that were slightly shocking to people - I said exactly what I thought, and people either loved me or hated me, or both, and there wasn't really an in between. It was fun though.

EDIT: Magical realism - that's the type of book I like. I couldn't think of what it was called :)

Now, I am a "technical writer" at a university, mostly editing scientific journal articles for publication, but I also do some PR for our studies - creating flyers, press releases and that type of thing. I did manage to get my name as an author on one journal article, so that's my big publication that came last year, and that, at least, made me feel a little better about working while my baby was with the babysitter. Most days, my job bores the hell out of me and I play on The Bump instead.