SPEW Week!

My local RWA chapter, LARA (Los Angeles Romance Authors), has a writing challenge about three times a year. This is similar to the Book in a Week challenges, but we call ours SPEW, which stands for Stop Procrastinating Everybody Write. We have a special Yahoo group for it, so we don't disturb the other members of the Chapter with our silliness. And silly it gets.

At the beginning of the week, we post our SPEW goals - write 1000 words a day or write 5 pages a day or write for 1 hour every day or finish a bloody chapter by the end of the week. The goals vary, but we post our progress toward those goals every day. To encourage and inspire each other, we also post pictures - mostly man candy - but also shoes, chocolate, delectable coffees, anything to make us feel good and carry on toward our goals.

Some of us also include inspirational quotations - somewhat modified. "Give me liberty or give me SPEW." "I SPEW therefore I am." "To err is human. To SPEW is divine." You get the picture. This SPEW week has included a plethora of Dr. Seuss SPEW quotations (can't remember how we got there). "Thing One and Thing SPEW." "Red fish, SPEW fish, one fish SPEW fish." And on and on. It starts to get quite hilarious, especially when you're writing at 11:00 at night and you have to sneak away to your email to check out the latest quotation or man candy.

What do all the emails and the man candy and the silliness accomplish? Well, besides keeping me inspired to meet my SPEW goal (20 pages on my WIP), it fosters an amazing sense of community. I don't believe any other group of genre writers has quite the comraderie of romance writers. I see it at conferences. I read it in emails. I experience it through my local chapter and through an amazing online goals group.

So before I get back to my own SPEWing, I'll leave you with some man candy....