Just seeing how folks are doing in their creative pursuits. Highs, lows, whatever!
I put up Ursula K. Le Guin's schedule as a writer and thought it was pretty neat.
Hope everyone's doing well.
Personally, I haven't looked at the draft of my manuscript since I finished it in May. It's feeling overwhelming, but I'm trying to gradually expose myself to sections of my writing. First opening the word doc, reading a few sentences, and stepping back before I get too much anxiety.
I'm also working on some freewriting exercises. I really got into the idea of Choose Your Own Adventures, like the sort you find on imgur. It's too bad so many of them are problematic. I think they make for cool writing prompts/role-playing experiences. I know it's not directly productive to my writing career, but that's mostly capitalism brain.
Congrats on finishing a manuscript in the first place! You'll get to editing when you get to editing. Any plans to publish it in some form or another?
Writing was going OK for a while, but I'm struggling a little with a few things. My fiance had surgery recently and it's been hard to focus on writing while I'm taking care of her. I'm also going back and forth on the pacing of a few things in my story. But I'm still really hopeful about it, and excited to get to a point where I feel comfortable starting to make final recordings (since it's gonna be a horror podcast).
So all in all, it's been slow going recently, but it's certainly still going.I hope your fiance's doing okay now. Caring for a loved one takes a lot of energy, so it makes sense that your focus is on her more than writing.
But I'm glad you're hopeful about your horror podcast. I hope you can share it when you're ready.
Thank you. She is getting better, but it's a slow process, probably at least until she gets the stitches out in another week or so. And I am absolutely gonna share it when I'm ready!
Actually, speaking of sharing, I have a few short stories I wrote a couple years ago which are up on a website (they were for a contest). I'd love to share those if anyone is interested in checking em out 🙂
I was in a serious groove, churning out around a thousand words a day, for weeks. Have a really beefy book of autofiction on my commute (which no longer exists) but it's not done yet, and I had a particularly bad week at work the other week and haven't been able to write since. Annoying how it seems to come in waves, but I'll get it back next week and finish this thing so I can start editing!
I rewrote a nonfiction book I posted here a few months ago called Workers Rise Up and then submitted it for self-publishing on amazon. That was two and a half days ago. Usually they only take a few hours to approve your books when you send them in. The maximum is three days. This probably means that they don't like the book for some reason. The last time this happened was a few years ago when I wrote this terrible anti-Jordan Peterson book called 13 Rules For Death which they rejected because it just looked and sounded too similar to 12 Rules For Life. I'm worried amazon isn't going to let me publish this book because they'll think I'm trying to incite a riot or something (which I am actually trying to do heheh). I'm only publishing it there because I want to have something on paper I can give workers who might have no more than a high school education. If amazon rejects it I'll have to find a different self-publishing company to send it to! And I also blew $30 to have someone on fiverr design a kind of okay cover for it too. Regardless of what happens I'll post an updated dropbox link here at some point if anyone wants to read it.
I'm also so so so fucking close to finishing my sci-fi trilogy completely. The first two books are completely edited and finished. The third is in second draft form. I just have to read 250 more motherfucking pages aloud to myself and then it's off to the editor at this small independent publisher which by some miracle accepted my query letter a long ass time ago. Then after a few days she'll send me her edits, 95% of which are just, like, insert a comma here, take a comma away there. Then I check her edits, send the motherfucker back, and that's it, I'm done. They publish it...and nobody reads it lol.
I'm thinking the next project is going to be a novel about a balkanized USA. What's super annoying though is that I actually have to write the book before I start shopping it around. So basically it's going to be months of me working my ass off without really knowing for sure if anyone is going to agree to take it. If they don't, I'll try self-publishing on amazon, and it'll just basically vanish into the void there. Such is the writer's life.
I've also been listening to this song on repeat for the last couple of days to kind of put me in a trance while I work. Still not tired of it. Touareg music / more traditional desert blues is really good for that I find:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuIvEAn76t0
I’d been writing a treatment for a short film, then I started working again and it zapped me of a lot of energy. Hopefully now that I’ve gotten used to my schedule again I can start setting aside a time to let friends read it and give feedback.
Lies.
Nobody's ideal day begins at 5:30 am. I refuse to believe it. Morning people are a myth.
I'm close to finishing a chapter in my novel, but over the past few days have really been struggling to get any of it done because of stress about work and the upcoming semester, both of which put severe limits on my time to write so the pressure to finish this chapter at least is working against me. I've only gotten about 2 pages (~1500 words) done since Monday, when that's usually what I write in one day. I might try my hand at getting up earlier and doing my writing in the morning like Le Guin does since I'm usually more "on" then.
