2025 Update: Quiet

I don't have any updates.

Which kinda begs the question: why post an update, then?

Well, to be completely honest, it's been over six months since my last post, so it felt like it was time to say something, even if it was just that I have nothing to say. I've posted at least one post a year since this blog's inception, so I want to make sure to keep that streak.

I'm not sure what happened this year. Well, I guess one of the things that happened was we stopped doing our Saturday afternoon write-ins. We switched them to Saturday evening maker nights. Unfortunately, people getting together to work on whatever (but mostly just socialize) hasn't been very nourishing for my creativity. I went a few times. I tried to write once, and it didn't go great. I did a puzzle online one night. And then I just sat around another night. I've stopped going. I don't know how to tell them that I need writing accountability, not just people around me. Unfortunately, nobody else is in a place where they are writing, aside from Neil. And we're meeting at his house, so he may feel motivated to work, but I don't. It's not been an environment to foster creativity for me.

That's not the only reason I haven't written, though. Not having accountability hasn't ever stopped me from writing at least a little in the past. So far this year, I've written 74 words.

No, the bigger issue is burnout. I don't know if the not-NaNo in November threw me, or if, I dunno. I've just hit a stage in my life where my little fantasy stories just don't hold my interest anymore. I'm definitely going through some preference changes. I'm rewatching Dexter again, getting ready for the new episodes, but it's just...hitting differently now. I got through the first two seasons and enjoyed them a lot, but I kind of ran aground on season three. And it's the same with Buffy. I caught a "live" episode or two recently on our TV app's live TV...and while I assumed it'd suck me in and make me want to do a rewatch, it did...not. In fact, it kinda gave me a gross feeling. I've experienced the same with reading, although that's been going on for awhile. The change from heavy fantasy to urban fantasy to more realistic fantasy to now, barely fantasy at all. I mean, still fantasy, but cozy fantasy. More light stuff. Romance, too, that's not even fantasy based.

I'm wondering if it might be time to think about writing new stuff. Something for a 44 year old woman rather than a 22 year old girl. A 44yo woman who is into hiking and camping and gardening and tiny houses and homesteading. The adventures I want to go on now include hiking to the tops of mountains and living in the wilderness for weeks at a time, when, back in the day, my idea of adventure was getting swept up by The Doctor or finding out magic was real and having to save the world from evil magic users or monsters.

Of course, I really want to wrap up outstanding projects before I transition into whatever new genres I decide to explore. I want to write at least another season or two of Sally Prescott. I want to get Mystwatch edited. Finish Chain Letter Choice. Once I get those things wrapped, then I think I will feel more free to experiment with other genres. I guess the good news with Sally Prescott is that, after the mini series, I have ideas for full-length thriller-type novels. I just have to get there, first. So like, I'm probably gonna have to write more than one SP adventure a year. I've got 15 left to write.

So I'm at an impasse. Do I force myself to tie up these projects neatly and give fiction-writing Sara a formal farewell? Or do I make it messy, trying new things, going back to old things. Or do I just sit and not write?

Well, you can see which one I have done for the last six months.

I do want to write, though. Something. I have been thinking about and poking at a few different projects. I just...there's all this pressure to start the exact right thing, so I don't get frustrated and quit. If I start writing something and it doesn't click, I'll bail and maybe go another six months without writing. It's a lot of pressure, so again, my decision has been not to make a decision.

It's dumb and I wanna stop. The fear of failing before I start is such a familiar one as far as writing goes. And the worst that happens is that, yeah, I don't write for a bit again. That's where I am currently at, so if I make any progress on anything at all, even if it doesn't click, it's still progress. It's still something.

So. I need to make some time and space to write. I just...can't put that onus on my friends who aren't there right now. So, I talked to Jack. He's mentioned he wants to start writing again. I asked if he'd be my accountability partner. He seemed tickled I asked. So. I think, at some point soon, I am going to start doing writing days with Jack. We'll probably set up at Old Chicago, where he does most of his writing anyway. I dunno if it'll be conducive to me writing, but we'll see, I suppose. I've even thought about inviting Rachel, although my guess is she isn't there yet, either. Might be nice to have this quiet thing that Jack and I do. Quietly.

So yeah. I have been quiet because my writing inspiration has been quiet. But now, I think I will try to start quietly writing. Quietly. Soon. So hopefully I'll have another update soon. Before December, anyway. Jeez.

December Update: I haven't updated since July???

Wow. This poor blog has been horribly neglected this year. I legit forgot about it again for almost six months.

But I have lots of writing progress to update about!

First, we kept meeting every Saturday through the end of September. I wrote about 7500 words across those three months, making good progress on both SP 2.5 and CLC.

In October, I took a break. I don't remember what exactly happened, there. I know some of it was travel-related. But I think a lot of it was lack of inspiration and a desire to spend time outside, as is typical for October.

But Neil and Dianne decided to host a non-Nanowrimo writing month, and they took my naming suggestion of AMOC (a month of confabulations), so I decided that I'd give it a shot. I haven't done an actual NaNo in many years. I skipped it entirely last year, and before that, I think I managed only a week, maybe two, each November. But using a new tracking website (Trackbear) and setting my own goal, I felt like it might be do-able. I was only going to do a half-NaNo at first, but then I decided that since that is an arbitrary number already, that aiming for 1k a day was a better goal. So a goal of 30k words, with the sub-goal in there finishing SP 2.5 first, then writing as many words as I could on CLC, maybe even finishing it.

I can officially say I completed my AMOC goal. I wrote 30k words, and I finished SP 2.5. I did not finish CLC, but I wrote 15k words on it. And now I'd say I'm within 5k of finishing the book. So, AMOC was a success. It was fun having a leaderboard again and having a graph like the old NaNo site. Keeping a streak of 14 days in a row to finish off SP was great. I didn't manage to keep a streak with CLC, but I did manage to write most days. And the best part is, I don't have the writing hangover I used to get with NaNo. I did have to write 3k on the last day to hit my goal, but the rest of the month, it felt like a comfortable pace. I hope that we do it again next year, because it was a lot of fun.

I also hope we do it again next year, because it put me pretty far ahead on my writing goals for next year. I am hoping to write at least a few thousand more words on CLC this December (since I don't have a writing hangover), so I'll be within a few thousand of done. That frees up two months next year in my project timeline.

I don't want to get too far ahead of myself, though. I could absolutely burn out before next November. But I plan on using Trackbear for my upcoming projects. I've already created a project for SP 3.1. I'm not sure when I'll start that one, but I do have the first line floating around in my mind, already, so I could start it any day now. I put my goal for the year next year as 60k. If I write 30k during AMOC next year, finish at least one SP novel and start another, that's easily 60k. That doesn't count any writing on Sleepy Shoals or any other project I decide to work on. It also doesn't count any editing, but I think I'll track that as a different goal.

I did really want to dive into Mystwatch edits next year. And I still might. But I'm not really feeling it right now. We'll see how I feel after holiday craziness and January blues have passed.

One last thing I haven't mentioned: I'm taking a hiatus from freelance editing. I really want to focus on my own writing for a year or two. Getting these projects that have been hanging on forever wrapped up is a huge priority right now. I know there will always be more projects, but getting back on track with two SP adventures a year, finishing CLC after all these years of dragging it out, and finally, finally giving Mystwatch the edit it deserves so I can do some sort of limited self-published print run are things that will allow me to reach a stage where I can either decide to lay my writing aside for good, or I can jump into a ton of new stuff and not have to look back.

So yeah. That's where I'm at, now, as we draw closer to the end of 2024. I am happy with my writing progress. I hope to write one or two more days before we ring in the New Year, but at this moment, I have written 56,000 words, spent 20 hours editing my work, wrote 4,000 brainstorming words, and have written a total of 60 days, averaging around 5 days per month. I even did a freelance developmental edit. Most importantly, I established a writing habit with my friends, getting together to at least look at my writing once a week for a few hours.

It's been a dang good year. Not my most prolific, for sure. But maybe my best since the days I was writing for publication. I'm looking forward to even more progress next year.

June Update: I haven't updated since January??

Okay, wow, holy cow. I thought I was doing monthly updates this year. Why did I think that? I seriously came here and panicked because I thought entries had been lost. I guess...I just decided not to update my progress. Weird.

So I guess that it goes without saying after that statement that I have, in fact, made progress. Here's a quick recap.

January, I apparently wrote 5500 words and edited for 2 hours, working on SP adventures.

February, I didn't do anything until the very last couple of days, where I finally started working on my fantasy Leverage thieves guild story. Managed 2100 words on that, so that's cool. A respectable start, anyway. Not that I know where it's going. It needs some more world building, I think.

March, I did nothing. No writing. No editing. No freelance from Lisa. I have no idea what happened in March. I think that's about the time I reached out to the writers and let them know that I did, in fact, want to start writing, but I couldn't do it on my own.

Because then, in April, I managed 1000 words and an hour of editing. Writing was on SP, editing on fantasy Leverage.

It looks like the middle of May is when we started meeting on Saturdays to write. I spent an hour deciding what to work on one of those write-ins, and then dove into CLC. By the end of the month, I'd spent 12 hours reading and editing CLC and wrote 2250 words.

I guess that's why I haven't updated. By the first of June, I didn't have a ton of progress to update. Although in all honesty, all of that is a ton of progress! Even though I took a break in March, the fact that I was touching projects enough to write 1-2k a month is impressive.

But I think the other reason I decided not to update is that the spark of inspiration was very small and fragile. I tend to get overzealous when I finally start writing again after a long break, and when I get excited, I make all these plans, and when I do that, I snuff it out. So. I think I remember deciding to see how June went before updating.

So, here we are, first of July. And I had a really great month! We met every Saturday to write. And since we got most of the social stuff and procrastinating done in May, but June, we were able to actually settle in and do a bit of writing. By the end of the month, I was averaging 1000 words on those days. Which is fantastic.

So, grand total for June: 6400 words and 4 hours editing, all work on CLC. I am at 98k on that novel, now, and have fixed a lot of the problems from early on. I still probably have 20k more worth of story to tell, and I'm losing steam on the project. But. I made awesome progress on it last month. A few more months like that, and I could finally get that thing finished. Which would be so awesome!

Trouble is, I am getting bored with it again. And I don't know if that's just, in general, bored with writing, or if it's the story I'm bored with. It wouldn't be the first time. It's very exciting when I first read it, but then I lose the excitement once it comes time to write new words. I don't know why. I'm debating pushing through and trying to get to the end over the next couple months. Or at least giving it one more month. I am down to about six more scenes that need to be written. Five and a half. Including the epilogue, which I've written a lot of already.

In my experience, finishing any book can be a slog. But I don't want to burn myself out. And I don't know that I want to waste my writing inspiration on a book I'm not excited about anymore. Luckily, I have some time to decide before our next write-in. Although I really ought to try to write a bit on non-write-in days. I managed that a bit in the beginning of June but not so much by the end.

I actually decided to make it my goal to write 200 words a day. That's less than a page a day. A few paragraphs. But I picked 200 words a day because that's 6k words a month. I was originally aiming for 5k a month this year, but I got behind by, y'know. Not writing. I know writing an extra thousand a month won't catch me up, but telling myself I only have to write 200 words a day makes it feel surmountable. Of course, 100-150 words would be even better, but it's not quite enough to get where I want to be. At any rate, if I can write 1000 words every 5 days, that's my 200 words. I can write 1000 words in less than an hour. So if I write 1000 words at write-ins, I only have to spend maybe another thirty minutes writing during the rest of the week.

I hope I can keep this up. I'd like to keep this up for at least a few more months to get some projects finished. If I can do it the rest of this year, I could realistically get CLC and SP 2.5 done. Those are my big goals. If I get nothing else done this year, I at the very least need to wrap up SP 2.5. And I'd like to spend at least one more month on CLC.

But I might rebel and just work on Sleepy Shoals instead.

I will likely try to write another blog at the beginning of August to give an update on how my July went. I'm excited to see where I go. I might have a freelance editing project in the middle. Maybe I can work on CLC until I get that, then switch projects once it's done.

I have options! And I have accountability! And I have at least a little bit of excitement to write. Here's hoping I get some good progress done this month.

January Update: Art

I once said in one of these blog posts, or some other blog of mine, that six months is about as long as I can go without writing before I start feeling the pull. Well, my last update here was July of last year. Here I am, six months later, here to report...progress?

Indeed. As is fairly typical, I spent the first week of January sick with a cold. But once the misery of that started to fade, the whisperings of characters with stories untold began to stir in the back of my mind. I got to thinking that maybe, just maybe, I'd like to write instead of paint. One of my resolutions this year was to make space for writing, after all. And I was finally in the mood.

I ignored the mood, though. Out of spite? Out of anger? Out of indignation? Out of apathy? I'm not sure. But, much like my dog, when ignored, it gets louder. So, I gave in. I opened up the Sally Prescott adventure I'd been working last year when the muse abandoned me. And I did the thing I always do. I started reading, and when I got to where I left off writing, I was pissed there wasn't more. I always get pissed that there isn't more. That the story didn't magically write itself or someone else didn't go in and finish writing it for me. That I am the one that has to write the words if I want to know how it ends.

Ugh.

But it's okay. I poked at the previous adventure to get my brain back in the right timeline space, and then I dove in. Four days later, I've written three thousand words and moved the story along pretty well, if I do say so myself. I even had fun, researching pirates and figuring out how Sally figures stuff out. My brain did the thing it always does when mulling over a plot, looking at things from every angle, trying to find the simplest, most efficient way to get to what I'm trying to do. I do worry that I may be stuck again, but I am also confident I can hand wave and/or figure it out. If not now, then the next time the need to write strikes me.

I'm hoping it continues to strike me for a bit longer this time, although I have a developmental edit coming up in a couple of days, so I'm running out of time to work on this. I don't like working on my own stuff while editing for other people. I have to live in the world to write and to edit, and I can't fully immerse myself in two worlds at the same time. Or at least, I've never tried, and I don't want to start, now.

So, yes. I may write a couple thousand more words before I get my editing project. And I may write five thousand or ten thousand more after I return the editing project.I don't know. I do know that I did what I always do when I start writing again, and hit the "project timeline" pretty hard. I started a new wordcount spreadsheet for this year and set my monthly goal for 5k. I logged into MyWriteClub and fixed the dates for all the projects I have in there. And I've made a plan of what I want to work on each year for the next decade. AND went to iStock and Selfpubbookcovers to contemplate covers for SP and Mystwatch. UGH. Why can't I just work on what I currently have open and not worry about what comes next? Why do I have to think about writing as producing product? Still? After all this time? You'd think I would have broken that by now, but I am now skeptical I ever will. I think I will always make a ten-year plan every time I start writing again. It sucks.

But I am trying. I read a newsletter from a watercolor painter I took some tutorials from last year. And she talks about art in a non-goal-oriented way. Well, first, she talked about goal setting and how we do it backward. First, you should figure out how you want to feel, and then figure out what it will take to feel that way. Then, you figure out the steps it will take to get there. I haven't taken the time to flip my way of thinking--my goals were all, "write one weekend a month, paint one weekend a month, adventure one weekend a month." Which, I think are good goals, because I feel good when I write and paint and adventure. But the other thing she points out...or actually one of the other artists I follow points out...is that you can't force art. You can make space for it, but if you don't enjoy it, don't do it. If you don't feel the drive to do it, you're not going to succeed. This is why I never did more with the singing classes I could have taken for free for a month. This is why I never play piano for more than a few weeks a year. I like the idea of singing or playing an instrument, but I don't enjoy practicing, and you have to practice to get better.

Painting...writing...I enjoy the practice for that. That's why I love Sally Prescott so much. She's practice. I can go into her world and play around with ridiculous stuff without consequence, because she's ridiculous and the world is ridiculous. And it's why I am so intimidated by finishing CLC and fixing Mystwatch. That's the performance. That, I don't want to get wrong. With painting, I feel like every painting I do is practice. I've never sat down to paint and thought, this is it. This is the performance. This is race day. Well, except once. When I painted my first NAMIL Art painting. That did feel like a test, y'know. A test of all my skills. But this year, I'm hoping to make those into practice rather than performance. Because I like practicing painting. Although I'm just not quite good enough yet to just paint. I still feel like I have to follow tutorials, which certainly complicates things. I'm close. My own paintings get better every time I have a freestyle painting weekend. But my best paintings are still the ones I paint while following someone else.

Anyway. The painting thing was a bit of a digression. But it reminds me so much of when I first got serious about writing. I would spend hours writing stupid things that didn't matter. In fact, the magic of the first Mystwatch book, before it was Mystwatch, before it was even going to be a series, was that I was just writing for practice. At some point, I stopped writing for the joy of writing, for practice, and felt like every time I wrote, I was performing. And in a way, I was. I was writing with hopes of publication. I'm not anymore, except for wanting to create physical copies for friends and family. But I feel like I broke that part of my brain. I walked the neural pathway so many times that it's permanent, even after the last few years of giving up on my publication dreams. Maybe because I still have this small hope of being a professional writer someday. A lot because I write these scenes, especially Sally Prescott, and I wish they could be movies or TV shows. That can't happen if these stories stay on my harddrive. But of course, that probably won't happen even if they were out in the world for all to read.

That was another digression. But. I've been thinking so much about art, lately. I've actually been thinking a lot about myself lately. I've been feeling lost. I've been out of touch with my spirituality. I have been out of touch with nature. I have been long adrift at sea, away from the harbors of writing. And it's now been a month since I did any painting. All of the things I use to define myself are very far away. And the finances haven't been going well, either, which is another thing I use to define myself (sadly).

So. Here I am. On my writing blog, talking about art, because I think art truly is part of the core of me. And I hope that because of or even in spite of my goals, I do manage to do more art this year. Painting without performing. Writing without worry. Taking photos without putting them on a website. Art is for me. And while I preen under the validation of art well done, at the heart of it, I have to do art because that is where I find value in myself. For better or worse.

July Update: Shifting inspiration

I was so proud of myself for my writing progress in June, so I figured that would inspire me to keep writing in July.

Unfortunately, it did not. I kinda wanted to write for the first week or so, but anytime I made time for it, I got that squirmy, uncomfortable dread feeling. I just haven't been in a writing frame of mind this month.

A lot of that is battling health stuff. I'm so tired all the time. A lot of that is being out of practice. Throwing crappy words at things feels like such a waste. Although the only way I'm going to get back in the swing of things is by doing.

I'm just not driven to write as much now as I used to be. It's not for a lack of ideas or projects. It's just the physical act of writing doesn't do much for me anymore. Not that I don't love going back to read over what I've written. I will always love that part. I just can't get excited to actually write. The magic seems to be well and truly dead.

My new creative outlet has really become watercolor painting.

I actually managed to do quite a bit of watercolor this past month. I started a 10-day challenge (that I actually gave up on because I decided I hated the way the person did the tutorials), had an afternoon where I painted without tutorials, and now I'm playing with my new palette so I can get ready to attempt some tutorials from my favorite Youtube artist. I'm hoping I can keep painting next month, as well. Even if it's just some of the brain relaxing abstracts from Andrea Nelson Art.

I might be picking up a new freelance editing client, as well. It's weird to me how that stuff is always cyclical. I gave up writing for editing awhile back. Even changed this blog over. Then I completely abandoned editing to focus on writing. Then Rachel got to writing again, then I took Lisa on as a client, and now, I've backed off to just dev editing for Lisa, and I might be doing some content edits for Kacey. And throughout all that, I have lost my writing mojo.

I don't want to give up on writing completely. That will always be an element of my life I return to. Even if it is just in the form of blogs and short stories or poking at old projects or being captivated by something new long enough to jot down a few thousand words. And I do, of course, want to put Mystwatch into the world someday. I need to fix book two to do that, so that's definitely high on my list of things to do. And I do want to keep writing a SP adventure a year, so at some point, I am going to have to write 10k-15k more on the adventure I started last month.

So maybe what I should do, now, is make time to sit with my writing. Maybe just one weekend, or one week. Say, okay, this is writing week. I gotta think about writing or touch a writing project every day this week before I go back to painting again.

I think that will be my goal for August. Jack will be gone on a spiritual retreat for a few days. My goal is to spend some time writing while he's gone.

Even if they are crappy words. I want to write some words. Four days. It shouldn't be hard to write some words for four days next month.

And maybe that will even open me up to writing some more.

I really want to finish this SP adventure this summer. Then, this fall, I can try my hand at editing Mystwatch. Or maybe I will poke at Sleepy Shoals or Once We Were Witches. Maybe even CLC.

I do want to write. Or rather, I want to want to. So, like I said, I'm not giving up. I'm just not pushing too hard. If I'm more inspired to paint, or even take photographs, then I will likely follow those inspirations so I can actually enjoy what I'm doing rather than suffer through for some perceived important end product.

June Update: Some small progress

I wrote in June! Woohoo!

Not many days of the month. Not according to my plan. Not nearly as many words on the days I did write that I had wanted. But. I wrote.

I wrote nearly 7200 words!

About 2400 of those words were me wrapping up Shadow Self, the Witch's Daughter #4. It needs a lot of editing, but the story is there. It's longer than I wanted. Each episode of her story has been a bit longer. But I think that's okay.

The rest of the words went to Sally Prescott. About 5k. Just shy. It started out kinda rough. I didn't really feel like I had the Sally humor, and I did a lot of meandering. But I finally hit my stride with it today and got some definite Sally moments. So. I am happy with it. It took five thousand words, but it's finally ready to launched into the main adventure. Which, to be honest, I should have probably gotten to faster. But I left the last adventure with a lot of upheaval, so it made sense to me to deal with the aftermath a bit at the start of this next adventure.

Anyway. Rocky start, but feeling good. I think I might be able to write some more on it next month. Maybe won't finish it. Maybe won't even get 10k, since that seems like a lot for me right now. But hey. When I was working on the last Mystwatch book all those years ago, I kept telling myself that 5k a month would get me to the end of the book by the end of the year. And so it goes with this as well. If I write 5k a month for two or three more months, I will finish this SP adventure.

That's really the main goal I want to accomplish this year. I just don't think I'd be okay with myself if I didn't get at least one SP adventure written a year. She's been a pretty constant companion the last five or so years. I've had goals where I wanted to get two or three adventures written a year so eventually I finish this series so I can start publishing it. But. I think I write her for me more than for publishing. Especially now. It's like with painting. I paint these landscapes to share on Instagram or put up to admire, but the abstract stuff I've been doing lately, that's for me. For me to do the act of painting without worrying too much about the end result. It's about the process.

Publishing is still one of those things I go back and forth on in general, though. I'm in a "I don't ever want to publish except maybe so my brother has a physical copy book of stuff" phase right now. Maybe when I finally retire and have more time, I will spend more time writing and I will be more serious about wanting to put it out there. But for now, I mostly want to finish things for me.

That may change before I retire. It has many times before.

So anyway. I met my goal of working on SP and finishing Shadow Self. Next month, I want to write at least 5k on SP. Maybe 10K if I can. But I will have a dev edit for a client in the middle of the month, plus nieces and nephew birthday parties and the 4th. So I will be pretty happy if I manage 5k.

At the end of July, we'll see where I'm at. I'll likely do a push to finish the SP adventure. But I also might be ready for Mystwatch by that point. Those characters were whispering in my head the other day. And Jack and I went downtown and made vampire jokes, which made me a bit nostalgic.

Sally first.

Then maybe Diana.

Then...maybe the Order and Chaos kids. But probably more likely it will be Sleepy Shoals.

That's probably more than I can get to this year, so I will leave it at that. I am just beyond happy I got over 7k written this month.

May Update: Hopefully finding my way back

I didn't update last month. Obviously. Partially because I forgot. But mostly because I still haven't been writing.

I didn't write in May, either.

That said. The last couple of days, I've been feeling that pull. That pull all artists know so very well. The pull to create. I toyed with the idea of painting. And I may still paint. But I've been thinking about Mystwatch a lot lately. I had an intense dream about Diana and Drexel, so they were on my mind for a few days. I decided that maybe I'd open up book 1 and see if I could get myself invested in the world, then maybe poke at book 2 edits. Work has finally slowed down, so I have time during the day, now. And I don't just want to watch hours of YouTube.

So today, I finally opened up my writing folder and took a chance. I read the first two paragraphs of book 1...and bailed.

Nope nope nope. That is not where I am right now. I was tweaking language and rethinking my opening line and just...no. It was supposed to be an immersion project, not a line editing project. Apparently I am in editing mode. Which makes sense. Every time I open that book, I want to make tweaks to make it even better. And it's not a strong enough opening for me to be immediately immersed. So. I have choices. I can either skim it until it gets to the immersion point. Or. I can skip book 1. I know that book backward and forward. I don't need to read it to edit book 2. It might help with mood, but once I settle into edits of book 2, I will be immersed enough.

But I don't think that's where my creative yearning is leading me right now.

Lighthouses. The world has been sending me lighthouses lately. So I opened up Nightmare of Sleepy Shoals after noping out of Mystwatch.

Oh. Oh yes. I was hooked by the first paragraph. This. This is the book I should be focusing on.

I could go back and tweak the first Mystwatch book until I die. It will always be a book with a slow start and a slow build. The second book will always switch plots halfway through. And the third book will always get bigger every time I read it, because there's always more I want to add to the world. For Mystwatch, I really just want to put book 2 back together and walk away. Maybe publish it so Aron can read it, with poorly designed stock photo covers. Maybe next time I visit, I can talk to him about my cover ideas, about either using the iStock photos or having Mary model for me. 

But I think it might be time to let Mystwatch go and move on. No self-publishing on Amazon for everyone to read. Just an on-demand set of books for friends and family that want to read it.

I know how to start books with a hook, now. Or at least, I did when I started Sleepy Shoals. The books I've written will always have a special place in my heart. I wouldn't be the writer I am without them. Although again, I haven't been much of a writer for over a year at this point.

But maybe I can be a better writer if I let go of the projects holding me back, and instead, move forward with new projects. Projects I started when I knew how to write a book, rather than projects I learned how to write a book with.

So, yes. I think in June, I would like to do some writing. I don't know how much, yet. And as excited as I am about Sleepy Shoals...I might actually start with Sally Prescott.

I am scared to start into a book that has such a great first chapter when I am this rusty at writing. If I can get through a SP adventure, maybe finish up the Witch's Daughter short I never finished back in January. then I will feel more confident about my ability to write this book I've built up to be so amazing in my head.

Because that's what it comes down to. It isn't that I don't have the ability. It's that I lack the confidence in my ability. I know if I just took my time, started slow, thought about each scene before I wrote it, I would be able to continue the momentum into this amazing book. But instead, I'd like to rush headlong into a Sally adventure that I don't have to think too hard or worry about.

Plus that is one of my goals this year. To finish at least one more SP adventure.

Then there's Chain Letter Choice, of course. I don't know what to do about that one. I want to finish it. I know I'm probably 20k shy of getting to the end. It's outlined. I have hashed out most of the details. Although I have forgotten everything Ewan and I talked about for the final order vs. chaos battle, so I will have to re-figure that out. But at the same time...I wonder if that's also a book I should let go of. I wanted so badly to finish it so I could be like, yes, detailed outlines work great for me. But at this point, maybe I need to give up on that idea. I may have to be an immersion writer. A discovery writer. Which might mean I spend six months at a time writing something, then don't write for six months to a year after that. As a hobbyist writer, that's totally okay. I don't have to write every month of the year. I don't even have to write every year.

But I should commit to projects and try to see them through once I start them.

So. I think tomorrow, I am going to try to finish Shadow Self. Friday, I will take a look at what I have for the next SP adventure. And then this weekend, maybe I will do some writing.

It's too damn hot out to do anything else. Summer is here, and outdoor adventures of my own are no fun anymore. Time to escape into other people's worlds.

Escape is good. While I am doing much, much better (after being sick with COVID for the first three weeks of May), I am still not 100% healthy yet. I am confident I will be, soon. But I have just enough energy for something creative, and not quite enough to do more than camp in the backyard or go for short hikes.

I feel optimistic about June. I just need to make sure I make time and make a point to write.

Even if I'm scared. Even if I'm rusty. Even if it's hard. Because it always is. Whether I'm coming back to it after a long break, or if I've been doing it almost every day for a year. It's always hard.

And honestly, that's one of the reasons it's so rewarding.

March Update: I'm so tired

I've mostly been dealing with health crap this month. Finally went to the doctor about my stomach. Not sure what he had me do changed much. I didn't even lose weight on this elimination diet. And I feel like I'm barely eating.

Anyway. This blog isn't about health. It's about writing!

But I didn't write this month. And I don't find it likely that I will in the next few days, either, as I have come down with a cold. Again.

I did get Lisa's copy edit done, though. She published it yesterday! Already some good reviews. It feels good being part of something like that. And although I will be glad to have the time back not doing her copy edits anymore, I will also kinda miss that part, too. Ah, well. Maybe I will go back to it someday. If she'll have me.

At any rate, Lisa's edits have been great practice. I hope to be able to apply all that practice to my own books.

I am planning on doing a SP novella for Camp NaNo next month. Camp NaNo are a good excuse to do SP, and SP is a good way to get back into writing when I haven't for awhile. So I am looking forward to it. Even if I don't get as far as I laid out in my project timeline spreadsheet for this year.

One thing writing adjacent that I did this month (other than Lisa's editing) was cover exploration. I found two and a half covers I adored for the Mystwatch trilogy, and I almost bought them. But then there was some weird stuff from the website I was going to buy them from, so I bailed. Now, I'm poking around on iStock, and I found all the images that were used. I'm debating putting together my own covers from those images. I can get so many images for a membership, or I can just outright buy stuff for probably less than the three covers would have cost. Yes, I will have to do it myself, but if I own the images, maybe someone artistic will take pity on me and help me fix them (Mary or Em or Jack, maybe). Alternatively...and I haven't broached this subject with them yet, but I'm thinking about seeing if Mary will model Diana for me. And then maybe use some Photoshop magic to make them look good. I know she's busy and this isn't really the kind of photography she does, but I think she'd make a perfect Diana, I have a couple of places I'd like to take pictures, I have the crossbow, and I think it'd be so cool to have covers that were taken in Lawrence. It would also be cool to have Mary do them, especially since Aron's the one who wants to read them in hard copy.

Anyway. There's not a huge rush on this. I haven't worked on book 2 edits a year this month. I'd like to get back to them between SP projects. As I mentioned, it's high on my list of things I'd ideally like to finish fixing this year. Along with finishing CLC. But. My energy has been low, my health has been bad, and life keeps freaking happening. So. I'm trying to aim low. I have poor health years every now and then. I guess this is my year.

Poor health and writing do not go very well together. And I'm not going to let myself feel bad for not having the energy to do something that is supposed to be fun. That's only a hobby, now.

February Update: Backtracking

Well, last month, I stated that for February, maybe I'd edit or maybe I'd write short stories or maybe both. What I didn't consider was the possibility of neither.

And that's what I did.

I'm not sure what happened. I lost my drive to finish the Witch's Daughter story, then nothing else seemed interesting, and then I got Lisa's dev edit. I was supposed to get that the 10th, then the 15th, then the 18th, then the 20th, and then it finally came on the 22nd. So of course, I didn't want to start into anything early in February knowing I'd need a week in the middle to work on someone else's book, and then it came over two weeks later than planned, which took up any other time I would have worked on my stuff.

I don't say that to sound bitter, although in hindsight, I guess I am a bit. Trying to leave time for Lisa's stuff takes away from my own. Which, I'm not doing a whole hell of a lot these days. But still. Knowing there are times I won't have any freetime makes it hard to get excited to start anything.

Anyway. I have her copy edit next month, so I'm not sure how much of my own stuff I'll get to in March, either. But. I hope to maybe at least read Mystwatch 1, so I can get into the Mystwatch mindset and maybe poke at book 2 edits. I have April set aside for Sally Prescott, so I hate to get too into anything and then have to switch gears. Copy edits usually take me 10 days or so. So I'd have two weeks, I guess.

Maybe I should just focus on short stories. I can write one of those in a day, if needed.

Or maybe I should just keep relaxing until April.

I don't know. I really thought I'd finally fallen back into this. I was excited. I had a plan.

And now I'm not excited and I'm behind on my plan. Well, not too far behind. If I don't get short stories written this year, that's fine. Those were just a way to tiptoe back into it. I can still work on some of my goals.

I talked to Aron about reading Mystwatch 3. I told him I'd done significant edits on books 1 and 2, so he'd need to reread those, as well. He wants them in hard copy, though. Which means finding covers that aren't awful at the very least. I've spend a lot of today looking at Selfpubbookcovers.com, but things on there are pretty hit and miss. I may be better off just trying harder on my own. Although I did find two that I kinda really like. If I can find a third that matches, maybe I'll do that. Although $300ish on reader copies for my brother...maybe I should hold off on that. I can work on cool covers in the time it will take me to finish editing. It'd be cool to take pictures around Lawrence and use those. Maybe I can even get people to pose in them for me. Jack could make a convincing Shaidron. Mary would be an awesome Diana. Aron could totally be Makai. Then I'd just have to figure out the silhouettes of the creatures I want to include and fuck around with effects and figure out good title/author text.

Yeah. I wanna do this, now. Heh. Sometimes I explore visual mediums to express my creativity. This could be fun. I'll have to brainstorm some ideas. I'm thinking that iconic Lawrence alleyway, the city scape from the top of the parking garage, and then maybe entryways into cemeteries? Oak Hill for sure. Maybe I could venture onto the Haskell grounds. Or maybe under that bridge on the rail trail. The view from Burcham could be neat.

Anyway. That's probably putting cart before horse. But. It's something I've thought a lot about since he requested real books. Getting proofs through Amazon is easy enough. And if they're just for Mary and Aron, they don't have to be perfectly copy edited and proofread. They just have to be as good as I can make them.

So, yeah. My update this month is I didn't do much of anything. I've done a lot of thinking, as usual. Hopefully March, there will be more doing.

January Update: New year, fresh start, old goals

Well, I left off last post not sure I'd actually do any writing in this New Year. And I didn't, to be honest. Not until the very last week. But. After a six-month hiatus...I am making a small amount of writing progress once again.

I talked about this in my main blog a bit, but it seems like half a year is about as long as I ever go without making at least some minimal writing progress. I can't ever stay away. I often need the long rests, especially when I've been hitting projects hard and pushing myself to reach challenging goals.

Which I feel I did last year. The fact that I wrote over 30k words on one novel over a few months was pretty intense. I always need breaks after that. And after the devastation of realizing how much work MystWatch 2 needs, it was difficult to make real progress on that one.

I did finish a whole SP novella. The end is garbage, but it has an ending. And oftentimes, I get to the end and think it's garbage, then go back and read and realize it's not as bad as all that. This was an important adventure, where the stakes get higher and the consequences bigger. It's where a shift in the series starts to happen. So, yeah. It was a hard one to wrap up. And while I don't love the execution of the last third of the story, I do like what happens, so I'm okay to keep going, at least. And I have a great first line for the last adventure of season 2! I'm excited to work on that this year.

Yeah. This year. I sat down at the beginning of January and made something of a plan for this year on my project timeline spreadsheet. As mentioned in my last post, it is mostly just finishing things I didn't finish last year. So finish writing Chain Letter Choice, finish editing MystWatch 2, write an outline for the next novel or two I want to write, and write 1-2 SP novellas. When I sat down to figure out the timeline for that, I got a bit overwhelmed. How does one finish a novel and edit a novel when one hasn't written or edited for half a year?

Well, one starts smaller.

I thought about starting with SP, but I didn't really have the energy for Sally's chaotic good energy. So. I am starting even smaller than that.

Short stories.

I haven't written a short story in awhile. I started a couple last year but never finished them. So, this year, these first two months, I am going to write short stories. I have three or four I want to play around with. The first is the next installment of Witch's Daughter. I'm almost finished. I have written up to the climax scene, then written notes for that, then started writing the resolution. I may not finish it by the end of the month, but I hope to. I should wrap up the month of January with around 5k words. Which is not the 8k words that will get me where I'd like to be by the end of this year. But. It's more words than I've written in the previous six months combined. So I'm counting it as a win.

Next month, I will probably try to write another short story. I have the knights unemployment office one that I really want to write, one about witches I started to write for Althea, one about little kids and a dragon that I'd like to finish for Althea (once I find an ending for it), and then, of course, the Makai short I've been toying with for awhile.

Now, I did put an editing month in for February between short story writing. We'll see how that turns out. Maybe I'll edit next month, maybe I'll write short stories, or maybe both. But yeah. Between now and the end of March, I'd like to finish at least a couple more short stories and start again on the Mystwatch 2 edit.

April is Camp NaNo, so I'll switch to Sally, then. She'll take a bulk of the following few months. She usually takes two months to write a complete adventure, and I'm hoping to write that consecutively this year like I did last year, because that worked pretty well. Once I finish month two of SP, I'll take a break month, where I'll try to outline my next novel. Then for the second round of Camp NaNo, I'll work on fixing and finishing SP 3.1, which I started writing ages ago. It needs massive edits to be able to fit the ending I want on it. So we'll see how that goes.

That puts me way beyond the first half of the year. If all that goes well, August will be more editing, September will be outlining another novel (probably the first Shane spinoff, because I've been thinking about him a lot, and I'll be working on Mystwatch edits in August), then October and November, I will dedicate to wrapping up Chain Letter Choice. I think it needs about 30k more words at this point. Ugh. So much longer than I ever meant for it to be (but I always write long, so that's no surprise). If I do a half-NaNo in November, I only need to do maybe 5k-10k in October.

Then, of course, December is a break. Or maybe one last short story. If I can finish three short stories this year, I will be tickled beyond belief.

And if I can finish all these other projects, as well, I will also be tickled. Maybe even to death. To finish CLC and season 2 of SP, finally edit Mystwatch 2 and get SP 3.1 in line with the rest of the series after starting it back before season 1 was even finished...that will feel so fucking amazing. I don't even care if I don't get any new novels outlined. Although I think it'd be nice to go into 2024 with at least a couple of novels ready to start into. Brand new stories.

Mystwatch 3 I think I had planned to poke at as far as editing this year, but we'll see. I may not have it in me. I may turn it over to my brother and sister for feedback. Since they devoured my other two books. Well, three, because both read Druid Wars, as well.

Anyway. As always, I've gotten way ahead of myself. I've written 4.5k words this year so far. Asking myself to write 70k more and edit a very broken novel seems like a lot.

But I've got 11 more months to face that.

So, yeah. My main goal this year is to finish old goals. So next year can be whatever I want it to be.

December Update: A Long Rest

So, my unintentional break ended up being more of an extended rest. The last few months have been difficult as far as my creativity goes. I've wanted to want to write, but in all honesty...it's been a relief not to. I go through this phase every now and then, where it's nice to pretend this isn't something I have to do.

Although more than that, I just haven't wanted to write. None of my stories felt interesting. I hated all of my characters. The physical act of writing sounded absolutely wretched. I couldn't even bring myself to read anything I'd written before. That's sometimes how I entice myself back to writing after a long break. Go back and read stuff I've written. It reminds me that I am a good writer and I do enjoy it. That I have lots of ideas and I do love my characters and worlds.

Finally, earlier this month, I was able to do that. I read some stuff I'd written and smiled. I am interested in my characters and my worlds again. But I'm still not ready to actually write, yet. I think I'm getting closer, but I'm still just worn so thin as far as writing inspiration. It won't take much to fray and give out, again.

So, I've decided to take the rest of this month to continue my long rest, as it were. No pressure. I've been doing some crafting and water color to meet my artistic needs, and that seems like enough, for now. I've also been reading a bunch. And even talking to my friends about writing, a bit.

The long and short of it is, even though I'm not writing now, I'm open to writing again sometime. I do hope it's sooner rather than later, but I can wait. I still have stories to tell. Books to finish. Ideas to play around with. Edits to make. To what end, I'm still not sure. Lisa seems convinced that I will publish, eventually. I'm not sure if I will or not. I'm not even sure I'm writing for anyone other than myself, at this point. Which is part of why it's hard to get motivated. And if I do the whole "maybe I will publish for just my small group of friends and family" to get motivated, it doesn't take long for that to blow up into "but maybe I will go ahead and publish on this publishing schedule and make all this money and write all these things."

It's such a delicate line to walk. And I fall off, a lot. Which is why I keep ending up here, after what looked like it was going to be such a productive year of getting things done, and instead, I stagnate halfway through.

Still, it's important to look back at what I have accomplished.

• I wrote 32k on Chain Letter Choice this year. That should have wrapped it up. It didn't. But I'm getting so much closer to the end, now.
• I spent a month on Mystwatch book 2, editing and making a plan for future edits. That included writing and scrapping a whole chapter.
• I finished SP 2.4, writing 20k words on it.
• I also edited three books for Lisa and a novella for Rachel.
• I brainstormed a lot of ideas and wrote some fanfic notes. Even started a couple of short stories.

So, despite not reaching all of my goals, I made really good progress. I don't want to lose sight of that.

My goal for next year is to check in with my writing each month and see how I feel. If I feel like writing, I will poke at projects. 

Projects with priority are

• Finish CLC
• Write a SP adventure
• Work on Mystwatch 2 edit
• Outline my next book (whether it's Druid Wars 2 or the first Shane novella or something else entirely new).

Mostly, finish up the things I didn't get to this year. Bonus things would be to finish two SP adventures instead of just one, actually finish the Mystwatch 2 edit, and actually start on my next book. But I'm going to aim small in hopes that I come out ahead, rather than aiming high and falling short, yet again.

I think I might take NaNo off my list of goals entirely. I love the idea of writing with abandon for a whole month to end up with 50k of a novel, but in reality, I'd rather go into it with a solid outline and take two or three months to write a solid 50k, not a rambling 50k. I do miss the idea of an exploration draft. But I just don't think I'm that kind of writer anymore. I can't go into something without a plan. Not the things I want to write, whether those are sequels or second-world fantasy stories. I think that, even though it's not done, I've shown with CLC that I can write off a detailed outline. And that I can spend two solid months writing the same book. I could probably do three, if I needed to, and that should be enough, if I'm fully immersed in a project, to write 45-60k.

Ugh. Why am I so slow?

Ugh. Why does it matter? This race is only with myself, and it's not even a race. It's...I don't know. I guess that's the problem. The goals keep changing, and what writing means to me keeps changing.

At any rate. I have lots of reflecting to do the next year. To answer those questions. To see if I can figure out what this is and when I need it and when I'm pushing too far or too hard. So. This blog isn't done. I still have lots of contemplation about writing to do and process. But this is my end-of-year post. This is it for this year.

I'll check back at the end of January to update on how things are going. Maybe they will be the same. Maybe January will be more thinking and flirting with writing and resting and crafting and painting.

But maybe, just maybe, I'll throw some words at a blank page or wrangle some existing ones that are mine and not someone else's.

We'll see.

Until then, farewell, 2022. Thank you for a year with more productivity than I probably deserved. And welcome 2023. May you be filled with creativity and joy.

August Update: A needed (if not wanted) break

This will be a short update. I did not write in August.

There. That's the update.

Although me being me, obviously I have more to say about it than that. Mostly that I didn't necessarily want or plan to take a break this month. Especially with last month being a kind-of break. But, as it turns out, I did manage to burn myself out a bit, I think, with even the casual goals I made.

Or I guess burnout isn't necessarily accurate. I just...don't want to write right now. Every time I settled down to write in July, it felt bad. This month, just thinking about writing felt bad. I felt loathing and disgust for all of my stories. None of my worlds were interesting. All of my characters were annoying. And I just didn't care what happened to any of them.

That realization hit about midway through the month, and rather than trying to salvage it, I just checked in with myself a few times to see if I felt differently. I never did, so I finally let it go.

I don't know what happened. I don't know if the month of August's energy is just off, or if it has to do with the moon or my energy level or what I've been reading lately. Or if it's just like every hobby that ebbs and flows.

Because as much as I have illusions of making money writing someday in retirement, the honest to goodness truth is that writing has become a hobby. And my hobbies I tend to pick up and put down as the mood strikes me.

As a hobby, there's a lot of "oh, I should do this thing," and then not doing it, then kind of shrugging of shoulders and realizing I didn't really want to do it that badly to begin with if I didn't make time for it. There's really no reason to push myself harder than that now that writing is only a hobby.

It is true that I have things I want to get finished. I have novels I want to finish, series I want to finish. And I have new things I want to start. But there are only so many hours in a day and I have a finite amount of energy. The last month, I've been focused on getting myself outside, moving my body, trying to find a balance of the things I consume. I spent a lot of this year fighting depression, and now that I'm connecting with nature again, that has subsided. I only cried for about ten seconds on Mom's birthday yesterday, and was only sad for about an hour.

I don't by any means believe I am done writing. The desire to return to my worlds and my characters and tell their stories will come back. It always does. But I don't want to force it. There's just no reason. My life is shifting focus. I just got a big raise at work, so I'm committed to seeing this through til retirement. I have savings plans in place to make sure I don't have to work in retirement unless I want to. I had thought about putting aside freelance money to fund the self-publishing of Mystwatch. But right now, I'd rather put that money toward other goals.

So, yeah. As of right now, this last day of August, I haven't written for over a month, and I feel okay about it. I may give it more of a shot in September. But I do have another freelance project coming, so I may focus on that instead.

At the very least, I will probably do some thinking and some shifting of my schedule to see what all I can still commit to finishing this year. Mystwatch 2 is definitely off the table. I just need to decide between CLC and SP. And then decide what my plan is for November. Whether I actually do NaNo or not. Or a half NaNo.

I will let y'all know how September turns out. Hopefully with more words written than the last two months combined! Take care, and have a great month.

July Update: Rest and (hopefully) Rejuvenation

I had big ambitions for July. I wanted to write something like 12k and finish writing Chain Letter Choice.

Instead, I busted my ass finishing Lisa's copy edit, and then devolved into zero motivation to write.

Truth is, I'm tired. Not physically, really. Mentally and emotionally. I tried to write a few times, but after a big push early in the month (before I dove too deeply into copy edits), words became a struggle. I am not sure if it's because the scene is hard or if I am just not in a writing frame of mind. Either way, whenever I had plans to write the last week, I couldn't quite manage it.

So, with five days left in the month, and two of those where I will be out of town, I've decided to call it. I managed to write 3,500 words on CLC, and for right now, I'm happy with that. No, it's not finished. No, I didn't get 12k or even 8k. But I made progress. That's all I can really ask of myself, especially when I'm this...antsy? About writing.

I'm feeling a little down about the trajectory of my writing "career" these days. Watching Lisa and her success is both motivating and exhausting. I admire her hard work and drive, but I do not have that in me. I'm not even sure I want to. Which brings me back around to, I'm writing because I want to tell these stories and finish things I've started. Which...isn't always motivating to get work done when I don't feel like it and have twelve other things I should be doing.

I would still like to finish CLC this year. Maybe I'll manage it in August. If not, I'll put off the next SP adventure and push through in September and into October, if I need to. I think finishing this is more important than the next SP. And probably even more important than Mystwatch 2. Yes, I took book 2 apart and need to put it back together again, but what's the rush? Right now, if I go back to Mystwatch, I kinda want to work on the first Shane novel. Novella? I'm not sure yet. I just cannot get excited about book 2. I've never been particularly excited about it. And honestly, the longer I wait to work it out, the more experience I will have fixing structural issues with books. I don't want to have to take it apart and put it back together again, so I need to be sure to do it right this time, if I can.

Anyway. Yeah. Chain Letter Choice is my priority for the rest of the year. And...I think...I might spend some of October brainstorming for Druid Wars 2. So that I can give it a go in November. So I can spend a few months next year wrapping that up, rather than spending the whole damn year writing it.

If I do that, I'll have more time for SP and maybe even edits for Mystwatch 2 in 2023.

As much as I'd love to get everything I'd planned on doing this year done, I know it's not going to happen. So now I need to decide where my focus should be. And I think I'd rather do Druid Wars, a world and characters I know, then starting a whole new world I still know nothing about for NaNo. I honestly believe I might need to step it back a notch, the number of projects per year, so I have down time to think and brainstorm and, honestly, rest.

Because Lisa is planning on putting out three books a year for awhile. At least this year and next. And if Rachel does even one or two books, that's something like five months out of the year I won't have time or maybe energy to write. I've decided the freelance editing takes precedence. For now. For the money. For the experience. For the time for me to really think about what it is I want out of writing.

Right now, I want to keep writing so I have something to talk about with my friends. And that's...not a great reason. I also want to finish things, which is a slightly better reason.

I guess another reason, one I lose sight of sometimes, is that I love having written. Turning a sentence from an outline into an emotional scene is just magical. Reading something I've read and laughing because I left myself a joke is amazing. And crying because I put to words a thought or feeling that is really powerful is, quite frankly, more rewarding than I can express.

So yeah. Those are the main reasons I write. That's good to remember. But it's also good to remember that sometimes, when I'm tired and spread too thin and putting too much pressure on myself to do All The Things, I lose those moments. Or at least don't take as much joy in them.

So. Yes. Camp NaNo was a bust. That may not bode well for NaNo proper. But I like to think by letting myself off easy this month, November will be easier. I don't want to go into NaNo exhausted. I need to be rested and excited and motivated. And I will do what I can in the months leading up to it to ensure that happens.

Next month, hopefully I have an update with more actual progress. But it's August. So we'll see if I hide in writing, or avoid writing entirely. I'd be happy with a healthy balance between those two things!

June Update: Halfway through the year!

It always cracks me up when I go back and read my previous month's update and plans and compare it to what actually happened.

June has been a crazy, busy, unpredictable month, as, erm, predicted. But. Writing things went a little differently than I thought they would.

First, my vacation plans fell through. Or rather, I bailed on them. It's a long story that I won't go into here, but rather than going to MN, I came home. And for a few days I did nothing but rest. Mentally and physically. And then, I started on the dev edit. The dev edit that came a week late, so I did not get to do it before my trip.

Which worked out. I wouldn't have wanted to be finalizing it on the last day before I left, as most of that day was spent shopping and packing. And after having the days to rest, I was able to come at it feeling refreshed. I got a really solid edit done in less than a week and got it back to her almost a week early.

And I won't be getting it back until today!

So that left me with about two weeks to work on my own stuff.

I wasn't confident that I'd be able to get into Mystwatch and do my edit in that amount of time, so I sat down with my project schedule, and did some rearranging. As of right now, my plan is to have CLC finished by the end of July's session of Camp NaNo. Once that is finally off my plate, fitting in writing words around my freelance editing project in June and July, I will have the mental capacity to go after Mystwatch 2 edits again. I'm giving it one month. August. My, erm, shittiest month. But. I've decided that I don't actually have to get that edit done this year. There's no penalty, so if I make decent headway on it in August, I can leave the rest of the edit for another time. I'm okay with that, right now. And then I have September and October to write the next SP adventure, then NaNo for my new project, and December to outline Druid Wars 2.

Phew!

So, looking at the two weeks I had in June, I was like, this new timeline is ambitions. And hell, that's two weeks I didn't think I was going to have free. I should be able to write my normal monthly goal of 8k in that amount of time if I buckle down.

Hahahahaha.

Oh, Sara. When will you learn.

But I did learn. I learned very quickly that was ridiculous. So I scaled it back. Told myself to aim for 4.5k. As long as I didn't have to write more than 15k words in July, I could afford to write fewer than 8k words in June.

It's going to be tight, and I'm still not sure I can wrap CLC up by 100k. But. I ended up writing 6k words on it this month. That puts me at 87k. So that leaves 13k for July. I'll probably aim for 12k, because July is a busy month, too. With the copy edit and both Althea's and Violet's birthdays. And, y'know. The 4th.

Blah blah blah, boring number stuff.

I am quickly nearing the end, in more exciting plot-related stuff. I've got a few key scenes left, and the downtime that goes between them, then I'm done. I'm starting to really believe I can finish this book this year. I wasn't sure when I started into this year what all I'd be able to accomplish. Turns out, quite a lot. If I can, in fact, finish this, and knock out one more SP story...I'll have finished a novel that's been outstanding for a few years as well as wrapping up season 2 of SP. That is huge. Even more huge if I finish the Mystwatch 2 book edit.

But there's no penalty if I don't manage it. I'm seeing what I am capable of if I go slow and listen to myself. I'm feeling this out so that I can fall into a routine that will sustain me until retirement. Or at least until I'm 50. I can decide what to do with my back catalogue at that point, if anything. And if I am a SP adventure or a book or two short, no worries. I either take another year or push myself to work faster.

My biggest goal this year is to see what I can do, how much I can do, consistently, and avoid burning myself out.

A big component of that is going to be NaNo. Can I do NaNo and not burn out? If I don't do NaNo, can I finish books? Although for that one, I already know I can, since I think Myswatch 3, I started and ended outside of NaNo and only ever managed 1600 words in NaNo proper...although looks like maybe 35k during Camp NaNo sessions.

I won't lie. I like the idea of spending October planning out a novel, November writing 50k of it, and then the next year spending a few months finishing it up. But maybe I can't do that. Maybe I just take a year to write a whole book, and then take a year editing and writing SP and other stuff. That's what I want to find out. And I can't truly find that out until I get CLC done and Mystwatch edited. I need to pick a project and see it through.

So. Maybe I don't do Druid Wars 2 next year. Maybe I finish whatever NaNo novel I start. And maybe I start writing Druid Wars 2 for NaNo next year and finish it the year after that.

It's only the end of June. Still a lot of wait and see how things go.

That said, I wanted to note that the writing has been fun and fairly easy the past two weeks. I definitely have times of feast and famine with writing. I am much more productive and in the flow in the summer. That's always been the case. By September, I'll be in peak writing mode, I assume. Hopefully I can put it all to good use.

Right now, I'm still working on things I feel comfortable with. It's when I start a totally new project in a totally new world where it's going to get scary and hard.

Or maybe exciting and easy.

Time will tell.

I'm really enjoying this year, seeing what I'm capable of when I just let myself follow my flow.

And, y'know. Learn the difference between I'm not writing because I'm depressed and can't and I'm not writing because the next scene is hard or I can't focus because whatever reason. Been a lot of that the last two weeks, but once I settle in, the focus finally comes.

I am content with my writing journey thus far. It's going really well, and I'm happy. Half a year down. Half a year to go!

And then seven more years until....profit?  :D

May Update: Success and Difficult Decisions

 I am happy to report that I have both my depression and my writing stagnation under control. I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm high on life and firing on all cylinders as far as writing, but I am not in the hole I was in for most of the winter and early spring.

That said, I didn't get as much writing done this month as I'd hoped. Or rather, I went above and beyond my word count goal, but didn't get the work on projects accomplished as I'd hoped.

Some of that is because I didn't do quite as much as I'd wanted in April, so I was playing catch-up a bit. I had hoped to get more of the current SP adventure written so that I could easily finish it up in May and then work on CLC a bit.

That didn't happen. But! I did finish this SP adventure. Yay! And it had some synchronicity there, because I finished this adventure exactly a year later, to the day, that I finished one last year. So that was neat. A little disappointing in that it's still taking me a year to finish an adventure. But at least I'm making consistent progress.

The downside is that I really rushed the finish. The whole adventure is kind of a mess. I have a big editing project down the line when it comes to this adventure. It's probably my least favorite one so far (which is saying a lot, because I also didn't love the last one, either, although I do kinda love it, now). I guess my least favorite adventure is always the one I just finished. I hated the aliens one, and the Seattle fairies one, and the Australian scuba diving one and...well, like I said. All of them. At some point or another. I guess that's part of the process. It always feels like a hot mess when I finish. But after some time away from it, I think I will be able to wrangle it into something good. I will say that even though I don't love the romance stuff I did in this adventure (it feels really forced), I do love the character growth Sally shows. I worry that I'm having her grow too quickly, though. This is only season two out of five. But maybe it's right. Season three is the season where her love interest actually starts seeing her as more than a kid, although season four is the one where he actually realizes he's been falling for her (and actually acts on it).

But I digress.

Or maybe not. I am here to talk about my writing, after all.

The other thing I did not do this month that I'd talked about was work on short stories. Which, I don't regret at all. Finishing the SP adventure was my priority. I still have a few days left this month, so maybe if I get some time, I'll poke at short stories.

But. I'm not going to have a lot of time. I get a manuscript for dev editing on Friday. I have a week to turn it around before I leave for vacation for a week, so it's a tight turn-around time. That brings me into June. After I get back from my vacation, I have a week before I get the MS back for copy editing. And that takes me through July.

So, June is going to be tricky. I have one week to work on my own stuff. Well. I guess when it comes to writing, even during edits, I have scheduled time to work on stuff. For an hour or two twice a week.

Trouble is, June was supposed to be Mystwatch 2 editing month. I was planning on finishing it. With everything else going on, I'm not sure I'll be able to manage it. Unless I dedicate the whole week after I'm back from vacation to it. We'll see. If I don't get it done next month, I do have October, which is a miscellaneous projects month, basically a buffer to finish up whatever I didn't get to this year, before NaNo and before my break in December.

I think I need to make some hard decisions, though. After wrapping up this SP adventure, I'm sitting here wondering if I will actually be able to write a second one this year in addition to finishing CLC. I think I'm going to have to make a choice between SP and CLC. July is supposed to be another Camp NaNo month where I'd planned to write maybe 14k. I didn't manage it in April. Do I think I can do it in July? And then finish it in August with enough time and energy to write a few thousand words on CLC?

I currently have all of September set aside to finish CLC. Right now, it needs probably 20k to wrap it up. I know I can't write that much in a month. I think 15k is my limit. I definitely can do 10k, as that's been my average this year. So I need to find a way to fit in another 10k in my current schedule. On top of finding time to finish my Mystwatch 2 edit.

So, yeah. I have to give something up this year. Either the second SP adventure, finishing CLC, or possibly not doing NaNo this year. The dev edit of Mystwatch 2 is nonnegotiable. I have to finish that this year.

What I think I'll probably do, or what I'll plan to do right now, is get as much of the Mystwatch edit done as I can in June. July and August I will finish up CLC. September, I might start a new SP adventure, just to give me some space from this last one and get a start on it this year. That way, maybe I can do one and a half SP adventures a year? And work up to two someday? That leaves October open for, like I said, finishing stuff up. If I want to finish SP, I can. If I haven't finished the Mystwatch edit, I will. Or if for some reason two months isn't enough to finish CLC.

The only thing that endangers is the Druid Wars 2 outline. Which...in all honesty, I don't think is going to take me more than a few days of mulling and brainstorming and then sitting down and putting stuff together. I have a lot of scenes in mind already. Just organizing what I've already got and finding connective tissue shouldn't take very long. I could probably even do that in December, because it's a project that will be good progress but not feel like a lot of work. Because it doesn't have to be perfect.

Heck, maybe I can just make December outlining month rather than break month. We'll see, I suppose.

And then there's November. Still not sure what I'm doing with that beast. We'll see when the month gets closer!

But for this month, I wrote 10.5k words, finished SP 2.4, and spent the minimum seven days working toward my goals. It was a successful month, even if it felt like pulling teeth some days! That's typical. At least the writing ability was there again, if rusty. The terror of losing it forever has passed.

And I have a tentative plan for the coming months, including my super busy June next month!

Now it's time to settle in and read Mystwatch 1 to get me in the mood and frame of mind for next month's edit. Yay.

April Update: Writing is slow, ideas are abundant

I hit a wall this past month. Not just writing. Depression hit hard, so most of my energies have been directed toward doing daily stuff like working and household stuff and feeding myself and sleeping. It's been a struggle.

I was already struggling with writing, though. I didn't talk about it at the last writers group meeting because I was just realizing how depressed I was and I didn't want to talk about it, or anything really. But the biggest thing I'm dealing with as far as writing right now isn't exactly writer's block, or impostor syndrome, although I guess it might be a combo of both. It's just that, when I go to reach for my writing skills when I sit down to write these days, it's just...not there. I have been writing for something like 20 years at this point. But my ability to do it? It is just...gone. I fumble around without a clue as to what I'm doing. It's not even a sluggish feeling. Or a feeling of I don't want to. It's that I LITERALLY CANNOT. It's terrifying.

So I have just been avoiding writing this past month because if I sit down to write one more time and the ability is still gone, I might lose my mind.

This goes beyond wanting to write and not having the time or energy or motivation. It's like reaching for a tool you've had and used often for half of your life, and it not being there anymore.

I don't think this will last. I imagine it'll come back. But I am so scared to even try.

I am at a bit of a loss as far as what to do for May, now. I had hoped to have most of this SP adventure written, so I'd just wrap it up then maybe move to CLC. But now I don't know what to do with myself. Do I try to write SP? Or do I go straight to CLC? Or do I work on something entirely different while I try to screw my writing cap back on? Or maybe I reread MystWatch 1 and see if I can give editing MystWatch 2 editing another crack.

Most of the month I just coasted, not worried about it, but then I made it worse by sitting down and making another 10 year plan. Why do I always do that?? Seriously. Things were going so well this year with my, write two days a week, take it slow, take it easy, don't think beyond this year, just see what you can comfortably do. But then I hit the editing month and was pressuring myself to work almost daily, and then I tried to back off but I was already burning out when this month hit, and then I broke it by thinking about how/when to monetize.

That said, the plan wasn't bad. Of course, I always make these plans when I can't write. Because making plans about writing instead of writing still feels like progress sometimes.

At any rate. As of writing this, it's only April 25. Maybe I'll get my ass in gear and write every day this week to catch up on Camp NaNo. Or maybe I'll just paint instead and consider this a break month.

More importantly, I have got to figure out what I'm doing next month. It's all a big question mark, and that terrifies me.

 ___________________________________________

It's now April 29, and things are going better. I did determine after writing that last part that I would buckle down and write a little bit every day for the rest of the month. I managed three days in a row on SP, a total of 3300 words. Last night, I spent the evening with my sister, but before I went over there, I did sit down and write a more detailed, concrete outline for the rest of the adventure. I have notes for each scene I need to write, so I should be able to knock it out pretty easily. When I'm able to write better.

It's been rough, writing SP the last few days. I don't feel very funny, so not a lot of humor is making it in. Which is sad. I always look forward to the funny bits. It all seems so forced, so maybe I've ruined it. But it's SP, so maybe that doesn't matter.

My 10 year plan didn't make room for SP at all. And that makes me legitimately sad. I know if I want to write a book a year and edit a book a year (although when I say "edit a book," I actually mean dev edit one book, copy edit one book, and proof one book, and also outline a new book), something will have to give. It just sucks that it would have to be Sally. Those I write for myself and I really enjoy them.

Anyway. After looking at my 10 year plan made me tired, I determined it's still do-able if I wait until I'm 50 to start it. That way, I have eight years to write whatever I want in any order I want. I want to publish MystWatch by 50, so maybe that's just what I do. And anything else I can build up between now and then will be gravy. I may have to back off to one SP a year rather than two, but that's more in line with what I've managed in the past.

Anyway. I have been writing the last four days, so I'm closer to my NaNo goal. And my April goal. Although I guess my original goal was to write the whole adventure. I am halfway, though! I think I can finish it next month then switch over to CLC and knock out some words. Maybe not many. Maybe just a few.

Then my project timeline has me switching back to Mystwatch 2 for June. Ugghhh. I may be ready by that point, though. Or I may be really into CLC and try to finish that entirely before switching to, I dunno. SP 2.5 or editing. I am playing it by ear, although I did seem to have a good sense of my ebb and flow of energies when making the original plan, so I may stick to it, after all.

But yeah. Biggest goal for May is to finish SP 2.4. Any words I add to CLC are bonus words, honestly. I will need to write a lot for CLC at some point, but I want to finish this SP adventure this year. I need to be doing at least one a year, or this series will never end. And as much as I contemplated giving up on her forever...that'll never happen. I'll always go back to her, even if I'm only telling her stories for myself. I am my number one fan, after all.

  ___________________________________________

 One final thing I wanted to talk about is the fact that, despite struggling with writing, I've been very much in tune with my creative energies. I've brainstormed more than one thing this month. I read over the first Pandemonium novel and got excited about it again. Made more detailed plans for the sequels. I have gone back and read over just about every story idea I've ever had. Read most of my short stories (even read a few kid-friendly ones to Althea, which she loved, although was afraid of the gremlin in Mischief after Midnight, woops). I wrote up some notes for the assassin story I've always toyed with. I wrote notes out for a dream I had. I started a new short story for Althea. I found a few old stories I never finished that I want to work on.

I am in the MOOD to write. I am excited about my stories. The actual act of writing is still tough, though. The words are coming, just slowly. They work better as brainstorms right now. But I'm making slow progress. I may not hit my Camp NaNo goal, but I still feel good about the last few days.

A lot of it is that I've been managing my depression better. That makes everything a little easier. I'm hoping between that and next month being May, I will have a prolific month.

I just don't have enough time in my life to write all the things I wish I could!

March Update: Lots of editing

I forgot that March is also a rough month for me. My mood fluctuates with the shifting weather, which is never consistent.

That said, I feel like I made a fair amount of progress this month. Not on anything I thought I would, but it wasn't a wasted month, that's for sure.

I started with a novel copy edit for one of my writers. That was an intensive, time-consuming project, but it went well and I feel good about it.

But. It had me in a very editing frame of mind. Maybe because of the dev edits then copy edits for two different projects that weren't mine. So, after one writing day trying to work on CLC, where I only managed 650 words before I let myself stop, I switched over to editing.

Yeah, yeah. Past Sara apparently knew better than I gave her credit for. I did need a break. From writing. From CLC. I wrote over 20k on it in two months, and I was getting bored. Which, isn't good when writing. Means readers will likely get bored. But. Either way. Taking a break was good.

I got myself excited for editing Mystwatch 2 by reading Mystwatch 3. Sound strange? It's not. I love that third book. I was going in to do a developmental editing treatment for it, but the truth is, I think structurally, it's solid. There are parts I thought about cutting or rearranging, but once I got in there, I decided everything is where it needs to be, and while I could trim up some spots, I think everything that's there needs to be. Although I will admit that after a month trying to edit book 2, I am starting to doubt my ability to recognize what is needed and isn't needed in my own books. I like all these scenes, all the dialogue. I don't want to cut anything. And each pass it gets bigger.

Anyway. There are things I need to tweak for book 3, don't get me wrong. It has a few things that need addressing in pretty big ways, and I haven't decided what to do about it, yet. But the fixes are more like a handful of lines here and there rather than writing entire new scenes or moving things around.

Which I am still doing with book 2. After about a week poking at book 3, I finally switched to book 2. And ugh. It needs so much work, still.

This will be the...third? Fourth? Fourth time, I think, that I've torn the pieces apart and rearranged them. Some of that is because the plot changes I'm making to book 2 have made it so a lot of other things need tweaking. Fixing the shelf paper as I go, as it were. I also needed to do a lot with my main character's motivation. She's very wishy washy in the current draft. Very reactive. So I made her proactive, and then also reactive to the things she proactively made happen. That sounds confusing, I know. Basically, for the first half of the book, she kind of just let people dictate what she could and couldn't do, and she grumbled about it a lot (very meanly, making her not very likeable). When she finally does something, it doesn't go well, and she goes back to not doing anything. And that happens three times. So I had to give her more action. Yes, she still has to deal with the fallout of her actions. But she's actually taking action. And moping less. And trying harder, honestly.

Anyway. That was a digression. I am making progress there. Slow progress. I beat my head against the wall for a few days, writing a new chapter I thought I needed. It's where I'd stopped my last attempt editing this last year, this new chapter. I spent an entire day trying to write it, after deciding what all needed to go into it. The entire day was pain. Each sentence I wrote, I wondered...is this hard because I don't want to write this, or because I don't need to write it.

Turns out, as a writer, you gotta trust yourself sometimes. It was hard to write because it didn't need to exist. I wasted an entire day coming up with a chapter that I did not need. That was rough. It made me nearly quit the book, again.

But. After giving my brain a break for a day, I sat down and wrote several brainstorming documents worth of, okay, if I don't write this chapter, what do I need to do instead? What parts that I came up with for this new chapter would still be good to include? If I don't put the parts from other chapters I was going to put here don't go here, after all, where do they go?

So I wrote a whole new outline of fixes I need to make for about seven chapters in the middle. Not all of it is big fixes. But I do need to write two new scenes and a montage. In a different place than where I was writing. Ugh.

I also still have to find places for a plotline that...well, should exist but doesn't, considering book 3. Which shouldn't be a lot. Just sentences here and there. And information in places where, before, I was vague.

The hardest part with all of that is making room for the new parts by cutting out some of the old stuff. Especially when it's a funny line or a nice moment. Hell, I had a really lovely scene in the new chapter I wrote that I can't use at all, sadly. But. I think right now, my focus will just be on putting new stuff in. I will worry about cutting stuff on another pass. I'd rather have everything I need and stuff I don't when I sit down to do the next phase of editing than have to write new stuff again.

Although the new stuff I'm adding, while I was uncertain about at first, I think has been really great. I guess we'll see if I still feel that way when I pick this back up again.

Which won't be for a couple of months. I got my editing to-do outline to a good place so I know what needs to happen for at least ten or so chapters. I think the next time I work on this, I'll have to do the same thing for the ten or so chapters after that, once I've got the middle section worked out.

Next month, I'll be working on a Sally Prescott adventure. I've signed up for Camp Nano, and I'm going to try to write the whole adventure. I need about 16k words. I've given myself May for overflow if I don't get there, but May, I go back to CLC. Then June, I will take another crack at editing book 2 of Mystwatch.

I don't know if I can wrap up my book 2 edit in a month. I still have October as a "wrap up projects" month along with Druid Wars 2 outline. So if I need to, I can finish it then. But. Maybe I can. My client did a massive dev edit rewrite in less than a month. And I made a lot of progress on my edit this month, even with spending a week on a copy edit for a client, and a little over a week focused on book 3. So, yeah. Maybe a full month focused on the second book, I'll be able to muddle through to the end. Although June isn't actually a full month, either. I have another copy edit to do for a week, and I'm spending a week traveling. So that really only gives me two weeks, again. I doubt I'll get to the end, then. Or maybe I will, now that I know what I need to do for most of the upcoming chapters. I won't be stuck, this time. I can just sit down and power through my detailed list of edits.

It might still need another editing pass, even after I'm done this one. Once I've got all the pieces in there that I think it needs to make a better story. Then, of course, the polishing begins. That'll take...well, hard to say. I've polished book one so many times, now. I'm not sure it'll ever live up to the polish of that book. But it doesn't have to, I suppose. Someday, maybe I'll hire an actual editor.

All right. This entry got long, devolving into vague details only I understand about my books. But. I think that's a nice change from talking about my 10-year plan. It's nice to talk about craft and stories rather than timelines and products. For now, I am focusing on the creative side. Maybe in a year or two, I'll start to think about the business stuff.

This year, I just want to make sure I can work on writing at least seven days out of the month. So far so good on that one! I spent fourteen days working on Mystwatch edits this month.

Three months of writing and editing so far. I am still doing this! Hope I can keep it up. I think I can. Even when I was "in a fight" with writing this month, I still didn't have any desire to quit. I think that's a good sign.

February Update: Still positive!

Woohoo, I made it through February! February is always a rough month for me, both mentally and physically. Good thing it's the shortest month of the year.

Not only did I make it through, but I achieved my writing goal! Not only did I achieve my writing goal, I surpassed it! I finished out my writing session yesterday with 12k words for February. I did a 2.4k word day yesterday, and I was already almost 2k past my goal at that point. So, yeah. I can do this. One month, I can see it as a fluke. Doing it two months in a row may still be a fluke, but it gives me more confidence that I can do it again. I'm feeling like I have set myself reasonable writing goals, and it feels so dang good when I surpass them!

I officially broke the 80k mark on Chain Letter Choice. I have written the same amount of words I ended NaNo with on that novel. Which feels amazing. The only problem is, I figured this novel would wrap up in around 90k words. I don't think that's going to work out unless I cut some scenes from my outline. Right now, I don't want to cut anything I'd planned. Pacing-wise, these scenes feel important. Also for character development. So, I'm leaving them in. If I decide this novel needs to be cut down to 90k words, I can cut in other places. I'm taking my time getting through the scenes I'm writing rather than rushing through them. It's balancing my need to be a discovery writer (things I don't expect keep popping up) but also my terror that stops me from writing when I don't know what comes next. I'm liking this detailed outline thing. It turns out it's not actually that detailed.

Trouble is, I keep having to revamp it. I'm already a chapter or two off from where I thought I was going to be. So there will be at least a few more chapters than I thought. Which is fine. But again, that means it'll come in closer to 100k or more when all is said and done. I might have to sit down with my outline sometime this month and restructure it. Again. But I'm waiting to see if it's just chapter numbers that are off, or if I have to swap order of POV again. I may need to add a chapter, which actually means adding two, since I'm putting normal human chapters between agent chapters.

Anyway! I'd talked about swapping editing and writing months for March in my update for last month. And I think my plan is to do that. If I can write 8k-10k words more on CLC in March, I should be within 10k-12k of wrapping it up. I had planned on doing Sally Prescott for Camp NaNo, but I'm reluctant to abandon CLC so close to the end. I do not see myself writing 20k in March, so I'll have to decide if I am going to take a break from CLC for SP, or if I'm going to punt SP down another month or two. Or maybe I just write one SP this year. I know I need to write two per year to get them all done before I turn 50, but I don't think I've ever managed two complete SP adventures in one year. One and a half, maybe. But two this year might be unrealistic, since this is my first year getting back into more frequent writing.

I'll give it some more thought once I get to the end of March, but maybe I can work on finishing CLC through April, work on SP in May, then take my editing break in June. By June, I will need a writing break. I scheduled in a writing break for March because I figured after two months of writing more than I had a month in awhile, I'd need a break. But I feel good! I feel confident and excited about my novel. I'd love to wrap it up before moving on to another project, if possible.

So, yeah. That's been my progress, and those are my goals. I'm really doing this. It's going well, and I'm so happy about it. I even did the novel dev edit for one of my writers and a complete edit for the novella for my other author. And I still got my own writing done. I made an effort to guard my writing days, and it worked. I got things back to my authors closer to the deadlines I'd given myself rather than early like I prefer, but I think that's okay. Good, even.

Editing for other people definitely has me thinking harder about my own writing. I know I'm still writing for myself, at this point, but some of the things I'm telling my writers echo through my head as I'm writing. Is this scene doing more than one thing? What is it showing? Does another scene do this better? It's helped me hone in on what I want each scene to do. Not only advance the plot, but reveal characterization and advance character relationships.

Anyway. Tomorrow is our monthly meeting, so no writing again until this weekend. I've thought of a couple of things I might want to tweak in what I just wrote, and also about how I can maybe cut parts of my outline. Maybe I'll do that this week, since I'm not writing until this weekend. But we'll see. Maybe I'll just keep moving forward rather than looking back.

Either way, the last two months have shown I can do this. I am doing this!

January Update: Here we go!

So, last month, the end of last year, I made a lot of ambitious goals for 2022. I went from, "I'm probably going to give up on writing" to, "let's give it a solid try for one more year." I was worried that'd crush my fragile creativity, but as it turns out, it's the best thing I could have done.

Things are going well.

Well enough that I think I am going to go back to monthly posts. If I'm really going to be writing and editing as much as my new Ambitious Plan has outlined, monthly check-ins will be necessary, I think. My quarterly updates last year were pretty long, and I wasn't doing that much.

So! Here us an update for January.

Actually, first, an update for December. Heh.

I wrote some more, after that last blog post. My initial goal, after sitting down with spreadsheets to plan out my 2022, was to write 2k more words on CLC so I could go into 2022 with CLC's word count at 60k. That didn't happen, but I did write almost 700 words on it, which isn't nothing. I also sat down with the SP adventure I was struggling with and wrote a 1700 word outline for it. So, I know roughly what happens in that story, now. That should help when I do Camp NaNo in April. I still don't know if I can write two SP adventures in a year, but the work I did in December should help.

Of course, Sally Prescott is a future Sara thing. Present Sara is hammering out words on CLC.

In January, I edited up the Shane Mystwatch short story (it took much less editing than I thought it needed). I sent it to my friends, but I don't think anyone has read it, yet. Ah, well. I wrote it mostly for me. And for Shane. I added to a scene in Mystwatch 3, only about 300 words, but I addressed something that I realized was bugging me (why didn't Stark ever tell Makai what he was?? I came up with a pretty simple answer). And THEN. Drumroll, please. I wrote not my 8k word goal for CLC, not 9k, but 10k on CLC!

Which means I not only blew past my January goal, but I also made up for the words I didn't manage in December. Woohoo!! And boy, is that novel coming along. Action scenes, plots moving forward. The three MCs are together, now, so that's been challenging. But fun. I have hit a bit of a wall, though. One of the things on my to-do list is to fix the outline. I've been kicking that thing down the line all month because it didn't affect what I was currently writing. Well, I've caught up to where it gets messy. So, yeah. Before I write anymore, I need to spend some time with the outline to figure out what scenes I need, what emotional beats I need to hit, and whose POV the remaining 7-8 chapters need to be in. I don't think it'll be hard. Most of it is there. Although looking back over my notes, I found something I disagree with Past Sara about. I hope that doesn't totally derail me. Part of the reason I was stuck on this book so long was that I knew how I wanted it to end, but I didn't know how to get there. Once I figured that piece out, I was able to get excited about it again. So, yeah. There are a few pieces I need to hammer out before I can start writing 1.2k, 1.5k, 2.2k words in a day again. I was hoping to do that yesterday, but I ran out of steam. I'll try to work on that tonight.

I am averaging my usual 1200 words per writing session. That can take anywhere from an hour to three hours, depending on what day it is and how motivated I am. So, all of my ambitious goals seem like they might actually be possible. I'm not sure I can actually write 14k words on a SP adventure in a month, but I am going to try. April, July, and November, I will push myself to write more than I do on a normal month.

Of course, my biggest fear right now is that, because I had a successful month, I am an absolute failure if I can't manage it again. So I'm trying to be gentle with myself. Yes, for February, I am aiming for 8k on CLC again. But I will also be editing a novel for someone, and maybe editing a novella for someone else. I can't expect to make 10k every month. And if I don't hit 8k next month, I've shown I can make it up on other months.

I actually did a lot of thinking about what broke me. And I think I've decided that it was unrealistic expectations of myself and pinning my dreams on a lot of factors I had no control over. My plan was to keep writing while querying. The idea was, I'd write a book, query it, and if it didn't get picked up, I'd move it to my self-publishing pile. Rinse, repeat, until I either got picked up by an agent, or had enough books written to keep myself going as a self-published writer. The trouble was, querying took all of my brain power. All of my brain was focused on analytical stuff, which left no room for creativity. Writing words as your product isn't the same as creating a product that doesn't require creativity. But once I got behind on my "product," my timeline went out the window. And the rejection was discouraging, as well. I'd built this whole system, and the system failed me. My system. The publishing industry. I didn't make contingency for failure on both fronts. My timelines imploded, my passion was long gone, and, overwhelmed with bitterness, I gave up the dream.

There's a bit more to it than that, obviously. Depression, other interests, a complete change in faith, disillusionment in things I'd had confidence in before. But overall, I set myself up for failure, and failure washed away the foundation I'd built everything on.

I'm slowly rebuilding. I've been working to find other ways to keep myself writing and motivated. So far, in the month and a half I've been working on this new plan, it's mostly been "is this going to work" as my motivation. I've asked myself a question. If I structure things this way, will I get things done, and will I work my way back to enjoying the process. I'm giving it a tentative timeline of this year (and maybe next, but I'm not looking too far ahead yet). By the end of this year, if I've gotten the things done I set out for myself to accomplish and didn't hate it, I will do another year. If, by the end of this year, I've failed again, I may still give it another year. But. I'm mostly doing this year to see how I feel, not what I get done. I will reassess at the end of this year. I will have a lot of data to parse, at that point.

As of right now, I'm jazzed but nervous. I actually feel like I might get to the end of CLC. That is really exciting. I'm actually thinking about swapping writing and editing months so I can keep working on it in March instead of taking a break. I'd hate to lose the momentum by switching to Mystwatch for March, then SP for April. But I'm going to reassess that at the end of February.

I am going into Februrary hopeful. I'm trying not to stress about expectations. It's only 8k words. That's only 1k words eight different times in February. I've kept this reasonable, which is why I managed to get 10k last month. I used to write 15k words in a good month. And I may strive for that again someday. But I am starting small and reasonable and seeing if I can achieve my ambitious goals that way without killing myself.

Because as Dianne said, the best way to kill your creativity is push yourself when your burnt out. I don't want to push. I mean, I do want to push. I want to push myself to do what I think I can. But not more than I can. It's such a hard balance. Goals too easy, I won't take it seriously. Goals too hard, I'll give up in frustration.

I guess the biggest goal is just figure out what kind of writer I am, now. Because I am still a writer. I may only be writing for myself. Or maybe self-publish someday in the future when I'm bored and have an even bigger back catalog. But for now, I'm writing for me. I'm the only one who seems interested in reading what I write, anyway. Knowing it just has to be good enough for me takes a lot of the pressure off. Makes it fun.

Hopefully next month I will still be this positive. Tentatively optimistic! Let's do this!