Tag: writing

Happy Birthday Month, Blog!

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My blogaversary is this Friday, May 4th (Otherwise known as Star Wars Day. Yes, I’m THAT nerdy). It’s been a really fun two years, and I have to admit that even though I haven’t been the most consistent blogger in the world, I’ve really enjoyed the side effect of blogging, namely, the accountability I have to make progress toward my goals (writing or otherwise).

I’ve enjoyed the blogging community, and have met a lot of lovely writers, readers, and delightful nerds (and in a few weeks, I will actually meet many of you in real life!) who have become some of my closest friends. Because I believe in sharing the love and “paying it forward,” I want to celebrate the month by hosting a little giveaway.

Usually, I would normally host a giveaway for a book or two, but since there are so. Many. Awesome. Books out this month, like Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Drowned Cities or Veronica Roth’s Insurgent, I thought it would be better for you all to pick the book you want!

So, for my Blog Birthday, I’ll be giving away a $20 Amazon (or Barnes and Noble) e-giftcard! (Winner’s preference, of course!) All you have to do is be a subscriber/follower of this blog, and comment below, and you’ll be entered into the raffle!

THIS GIVEAWAY IS NOW CLOSED. Congratulations, Michele S!

 

Also, because I want you to know how much I appreciate you, any comment on any post this month, will count as extra entries!

So, tell me…Why do YOU blog? If you’re not a blogger, please feel free to share your goals for this year! If you’re a fellow writer, anything fun and shiny you’re working on?

Necessary Writing Tools

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The computer is arguably the most useful tool for writing, but I would like to posit that a proper mindset gets me to that computer in the first place and allows me to drown out the negative internal voices that tell me everyday that I’m not good enough.

I’m nearing The End of WIP2. With every word I manage to punch out on the keyboard today, I say to those voices: “suck it.”

O Motivation, Where Art Thou?

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So I’m procrastinating. Ignoring the blank page of my notebook. Unflinchingly staring down the blinking cursor. Blink. Blink. Blink. And, all I can do is laugh. Except not too loudly since I’m in a library.

Yup, I’m at a place where I can usually bust out 5 pages without thinking about it, and here I am giggling over silly pictures on the shiny interwebz. I’m wasting awesome playlist music on random things rather than using it to fuel and focus my work on WIP2.

And, you know what’s even more hilarious? I’m so stinking close to finishing this rough draft, that I can already envision my future self beating up my past self (aka, my current present self) for not finishing sooner.

And all I can do is giggle.

I think my brain is broken.

 

Far From a Finished Draft

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“Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in getting up every time we do.” Confucius.

So, I put myself on a blogging hiatus simply because I wanted to focus on finishing this draft of WIP2. At this point, I’m still far from The End, but I’m getting ever nearer.

I probably would have been closer to the finish (in fact, I was hoping this would have been a “Yes, I wrote The End!” blog post, but whatever), had I not burnt out sometime between last Monday and this past Tuesday. Sure, being mentally exhausted from the paythebills job didn’t really help me. (I needed to be a little more extrovert-y these past two weeks in my paythebills job, which already strains the limit of my introverted nature.) But, I honestly think I simply got hit with another stupid “fear of some kind of failure” panic attack.

I started to think too much about the story I’ve written so far; obsess too much about the work I’ll have to do to revise it; cringe about all the horrible writing that I’m going to be subjecting my poor crit partners to. So, that mindset just made me shut down and not have anything to write about whenever I sat down to write anything. I even started to entertain the thoughts of working on one of my many other WIP ideas rather than finishing WIP2.

But then…I decided to just plow through the actual storyline, even if that meant writing huge swaths of nothing but chapter summaries. At the very least, I was hoping to see images of scenes again, something, anything, to remind me why I loved this story. I plodded along and added a few pages here and there, but nothing amazing, and surely nothing I’d be proud to put my name on.

Sometime around 3AM this morning, I read a little blog post that Merrilee Faber shared. It’s from Janice Hardy’s blog: The Other Side of the Story. The blog talks about revisions, mainly, but what I liked most about the post were passages like this…

I knew when I wrote this draft that it was a bit “all over the place” because it was wrapping up the trilogy and I wasn’t sure how some things were going to pan out. I needed to write it and see what happened, and then needed to hear what folks said about it before I went back and revised.

…and this…

I cut 10K words (four entire chapters) without batting an eye because I didn’t need them anymore. They did their job to get me mentally where I needed to be, but they hurt the story to leave them in.

I know it’s a little thing, but finding someone who had to write in weird, meandering ways just to get to the place where they mentally needed to be to get through the story was encouraging to me. (Also, that she sent it out like that to gain feedback from her critters before revising it herself.) It immediately made me want to open my WIP2 and add a few more words. (At that point it was nearly 5AM, so I didn’t add too many pages, but I added a few, and that was all that mattered to me.)

I wish I could say that I did indeed find those tricksy muses and voila, I’m hot on their heels racing toward The End. I clearly didn’t, and I’m still plodding. But, I’m here and writing out all the stuff that’s lodged in my mind, and not paying attention to that little internal editor that’s telling me that whatever I’m writing is wrong/useless/unnecessary/doesn’t align with the MC’s characterization or voice.

I’m writing, and as rambly and pointless as those words are, they are getting me closer to The End (much closer than I would be if I waited for perfection.)