Happy New Year!

How was your holiday?

I have to admit I enjoyed my blogging break immensely. I don’t think I realized before how much time I was spending thinking about blogs, coming up with ideas, researching ideas, and then writing about them. It can be incredibly time consuming – no wonder I didn’t have a lot of time for anything else.

So during the break I did a lot of thinking about what I wanted to accomplish, and how I could accomplish it. And I decided it was time to take a step back from the blog schedule. To be honest, I’m not sure how I ended up on this strict blog schedule in the first place.

Where did the detailed Wordage Report come from? Sometimes it takes forever to come up with an idea to preface the report, which is time consuming, as is researching the idea and creating a post about it.

Ditto for Poetry Wednesdays. Coming up with a new form a week can be very time consuming – they’re getting harder and harder to find, too. And again, then I have to research the form, create the post, and come up with an example that rarely comes easily to me. And the sad part is, the only poetry I wrote last year were forms or poemwork for my poetry group. I wrote nothing for pleasure.

And where did Fiction Fridays come from? I mean, yeah, it’s nice to share what I’m working on once in a while, but every Friday? I’ve got over a hundred flash stories – some good, some not so good – that are the result of having to post something on Fridays, but because of this “blog schedule” I don’t really have time to do anything with them.

When I started this blog, I had a manifesto that read:

I will not be sticking to a schedule, just updating as the spirit moves me.
I will not be sharing the length of time my writing sessions are.
I will be showing progress bars on my current projects.
I will be talking about said projects.
I will be talking honestly about how the writing's going.

That was it. That’s how it all started, and that’s what I’m going back to.

Starting this week there will be no more Wordage Reports, no more Fiction Fridays, and no more Poetry Wednesdays. I’ll post when I have something to say. If I write a poem, I’ll probably share it. If I come up with the idea for a new serial, I may share that as well. And I’ll periodically share how the writing/editing is going.

But no more distracting schedules. Hopefully, without the burden of the can’t do that I have to write a blog post hanging over my head, I’ll finally get my writing back on track.

One can only hope. 😊

Changes

Got Cheese?

You know, to go with all that whining I’ve been doing lately. ;-)

Here’s the part where I confess that I’ve been working on this blog post for the last two three hours. I keep deleting what I’ve written because it also seems rather whiny.

“This year’s been a struggle” – whine, whine, whine.

“I suffer from depression” – whine, whine, whine.

“I also have seasonal affective disorder and it’s raining” – whine, whine, whine.

So then I tell myself I need to be more positive, and myself sits back with her feet on my desk, sticking her tongue out and shooting rubber bands at me.

Take a deep breath.

The best writing I’ve done this year is when I don’t stop to think about it, I just do it. I don’t know if that’ll work so well with the editing, but I’m going to give it a try this week. I have come to the conclusion that I will probably not have my anthology edited before the end of next week, but that’s okay. I have an alternate plan for it which might work out even better.

In the meantime, if you saw Saturday’s post then you also saw the picture I posted with the suggestion it be used for this week’s writing prompt (which is why I’m not ending this post with a prompt).

I’ve been posting here on Saturdays and Tuesdays to make it easier on myself because I post on my other blog on Mondays and Fridays. I was going to switch the writing prompt to the Saturday post, like I did this week, and Tuesdays I was going set my goals for the week (with the results showing the following week) but that just seems weird to start the week on Tuesday.

Hmm. Maybe I’ll start setting my goals on Sunday and go to Thursdays for sharing and prompts. Well, for sharing anyway. I’ll probably just forget about the prompts for the month of November while I’m busy with NaNo. And maybe I won’t make the switch until the first of November.

Confused yet? Yeah, me too. LOL

In a nutshell. This week I’m posting today and Saturday – here’s the LINK to that post if you want to give the monk story a try. Next week I’ll post my weekly goals on Tuesday (this week’s goal is simply to get myself organized and moving forward), but then my next post will be Sunday, which will also be a goals post and my strategy for NaNoWriMo.

What’s NaNo, you ask?”

Come back Saturday and I’ll tell you. :-D

Prompt Me - The Tea Party

As I mentioned earlier in the week, I’d like to feature a little more writing on this blog without getting locked into a weekly thing. But while weekly seems to be too much, monthly sounds just about right.

So starting today, I’m going to put up a prompt on the first Friday of each month. Hopefully some time before the end of the month I’ll be inspired to come up with a story or poem or maybe even a non-fiction piece based on this prompt because on the last Friday of each month I’ll be posting whatever it is I’ve come up with.

But wait! That’s not all. I’d love for you to join me. Have a look at the picture, think about it, and then let your creative juices flow. If you like, you can email me at crward(dot)author(at)gmail(dot)com what you came up with and I’ll post it on the last Friday of the month.

If you don’t want to wait that long, check out the weekly prompt you can find on the Brazen Snake Books website.  I think you’ll find these are a little more challenging than a simple picture prompt. ;-)

Happy writing!

It’s Been A Long Road ...

Rod Stewart got it right when he used that as his opening line for his song “Faith of the Heart.” It has definitely been a long road getting from there to here. And I don’t just mean the unintentional three week break I took after my last post.

Normally I use the beginning of a new year to shake up things on my blogs, take a look at what’s working and what’s not, and reorganize things to my satisfaction. And I kept meaning to do that here, but ... this year I’m finding myself with less free time during the week and the weekends just aren’t big enough for all the things I want/need to accomplish. I have ideas, but I haven’t had a chance to implement them yet.

This blog did really well last year (by my standards) and I’d like to keep up the good work but that doesn't mean it couldn't use some shaking up.

One of the things I’d like to change is the whole quotes post. On the one hand, Jamie and I go to a lot of trouble looking up quotes for each other and it’d be a shame to waste them. But on the other hand, when you’re quoting about something so specific there’s really not a lot of room for interpretation, so the whole little lesson/lecture thing gets repetitive.

Something I’d like to see added is a little more poetry and maybe some flash fiction. The problem with these, however, is that I don’t want to fall into the trap of being forced to do them on a weekly basis. Been there, done that, it wasn’t pretty.

I had a poetry blog at one time where I was introducing a new form each week and writing an original example. It got really old, really fast, sucking the love of poetry out of me as it became more of a chore than an expression of thoughts and feelings. Same thing happened with the flash fiction - forcing myself to come up with a story each week sucked all the fun out of it. So this is something I'm still thinking about.

And the writing reports? Yeah, they need to be revamped as well. I use an awful lot of words to basically say either the writing went well or I suck each week. :-)

Unfortunately, these things take time to figure out, as does figuring out the direction I want my writing to take.

Then last week I was down for the count with a severe bout of viral gastroenteritis (stomach flu). One of the few benefits of this (other than allowing me to curl up in the recliner, guilt-free, basically doing nothing all day) is it gave me plenty of time to think, to sort out where I’m going and maybe how to get there. I wouldn’t say I had any great epiphany or anything, but I think I have a clearer sense of the direction I’d like to be headed.

Sometimes we just get so much in front of us we can’t see the forest for the trees and we get overwhelmed. I know I sure do. When this happens it helps to pick one direction - maybe an unexpected one - and see where it goes. Trust in yourself.

Maybe that’s all it takes - a little faith of the heart.