I Love You, NPR

NPR Marketplace has provided a mighty weapon for my memoir arsenal. My memoir will cover one financially and personally chaotic year of my life: April 2007-April 2008. It was one of those game-changing years that felt like a decade, and even now in 2010 it's hard to look back and make sense of it.

The personal part of the memoir is relatively simple: I'm the main character and this all happened to me and my husband and son, so I know the material. Ron and I were talking about a major day in this year, it was the day we hit bottom, absolutely bottom. It was the day we found out that we'd forgotten a credit card bill in the moving frenzy and KeyBank had jacked up the APR on a hefty balance to 29.99% (!) We're talking a $1,000 minimum payment here. I called Ron and a panic, just sobbing over the phone.

So hell yeah, I remember that day. Ron remembers that day. But I want to talk about more than the personal side of that year. I want to talk about the broad financial backdrop that this drama was played out against. This was a crucial year for the country financially as well.

During that year, I was (and still am) an avid listener of National Public Radio's "Marketplace," which is good at summarizing the business news of the day so even I can understand it a little. I remember listening to the little podcasts on the way to work, sensing that something big was coming, something that threatened to dwarf even our own troubles. But gosh, I can't remember what story played what month, etc.

But those Marketplace angels have created something that fits my needs perfectly. They have an amazing archive of every damn episode. By Date. With Transcripts. What a find! Now I have 52 Marketplace episodes at my fingertips that aired in the year I'm describing. Just beautiful.

Writing Goals

Writing Goals are cute. They're so cute you just want to pinch their little chubby cheeks.

Until you totally blow your Writing Goals. Then you just want to smack them around.

Here's a typical list of writing goals I see on the Internet:

1) A page a day min.
2) Continue notes for freaky Evil Clam of Death novel.
3) Write another scene for Son of Serpents script.
4) Continue edit of Snowball in Hell story.
5) Continue Doofuswald novel.
6) Edit You Can't Write So Give Up column for Whoreads.com.
7) Edit Shameless Rip-Off story for fanfiction.com

And that's only for a two-week period! Whoa! Over-achieve much? Now this might be a bit ridiculous coming from someone with seven equally ridiculous-sounding goals on her own blog, but you don't think I'm actually doing all that stuff, do you? Plus eat and sleep and raise my kid and talk to my husband and ... oh yeah ... work? Actually I'm only doing one ("Writing a short memoir"). The rest are there for show.

(By the way, I should point out that Goal #6 above is a column for Who reads.com, not Whore ads.com. Just to be clear.)

So maybe these Writing Goals I'm reading online are for show too. I hope so. But then I hate multitasking. I can barely type a blog post and drink a bottle of Snapple.

(Oops, I just spilled Snapple on my keyboard. dddkkkkkkkkkkke)

OK, back on topic. You'll notice that my goal list is not called "Writing Goals" but "Projects on My Mind." My writing actual goals are a bit more process-based:

1) Do one writerly thing a day. Writerly things are defined as reading my writer mag, reading writer blogs, posting a writer blog post, sending out a query or contest entry or — gasp! — actually writing something.
2) Go write in a cafe one day a week.
3) Set up a writer schedule and stick to it.
4) Work out three times a week.

Goal #4 doesn't sound like a writing goal, but it is, because if I don't work out, then sitting at my computer for any length of time gets painful and — surprise — I quit writing.

So there you go. I start out making fun of writing goals and then make some myself. But that's the kind of knee-jerk, reactionary opinion that Killer Robot readers have come to expect, even in the short lifetime of this blog.