The NaNoWriMo Madness

I enjoyed reading Jim Butcher’s NaNoWriMo pep talk last night. Good stuff. However, I am happy National Novel Writing Month is almost over

One of the drawbacks to nanowrimo is that there is such a thing as writers who write mostly using inspiration. They say practice writing every day, don’t wait for inspiration to strike. However, forcing yourself to write every day can become draining and annoying real quick.

I’m in the home stretch, I’ve written over 40,000 words this month, I only missed one day where I didn’t write anything at all, I’ve managed to stay ahead of the daily requirement of 1667 words most of the month, and I’m sick to death of forcing myself to write everyday. Practice is all good and well but I prefer to meander in my thoughts, let ideas marinate and evolve or fall away. The danger in this method is that it takes longer to finish a manuscript. If you crank it out, you’ve got something to work with and tend to get most of your plot and central action down. Its different for every writer I guess. All I know is I can’t wait for this month to be over.

Absolutely forget rushing to revise the book for the publishing opportunities nanowrimo offers. I want the glory of saying  “I did it again, yeah!” but I  am freaking DONE come November 30th! I’m not rushing to do anything this year.

ownership

Yes, YES YES. Thank you for this!

Adventures in Juggling

Working this week on me being the sole proprietor of my thoughts, my memories, my words, my opinions with my therapist has been hard. A lifetime of being told these are not mine, not real, not true, not worthy of being shared takes it toll. It’s one of the reason why I stopped writing decades ago, much to the disappointment of a high school writing teacher who just recently reconnected via Facebook upon discovering that after high school I stopped writing altogether. I did stop, until I started blogging more than ten years ago. First in secret. Then with a faceless audience who seemed to like the words and thoughts I put out there. Then it grew and grew as did the audience some who know me very well and some who like to imagine that they know me even better than I know me and now, well sometimes it’s…

View original post 106 more words

On Telling the World I Want to Die 2

I wrote a post a few weeks ago with this title (and have since removed it). I was feeling particularly suicidal at the time and was seriously going to end my life at the first opportunity. I couldn’t get it out of my head. I just didn’t want to be here anymore.

I realized that the reason I felt like this is because of my environment and the people around me. Its absolutely toxic. Without going into the details, I’d like to throw some advice out there that might seem pretty obvious to a lot of people, especially other writers:

If something around you is getting in the way of your work, if its cramping or breaking your creative spirit, remove it or remove yourself from it, if you can. My own situation is rather complicated, but I’m trying to remove myself from the toxic environment and people that have helped cause me to want to end my life and are stopping me from writing.

Even doing small things to separate myself from them has worked wonders, I’ve gotten more writing done consistently than I have ever in my adult life.

Its going to take a lot of work but I think I can do it. I want to get out of here so I can spend more of my time and energy doing what I love–writing.