And the tree doesn’t fall,
Does anybody hear?
Too late, skip that,
Hey there, nice hat,
How you been, good day,
Wish I had more to say.
If the bird sits in the forest,
Keeps his song to himself –
Does anybody know?
No time, too rushed,
Gotta go catch my bus,
Still don’t know why
I don’t have any time.
If a forest lives
In the heart of a writer
And nobody finds it,
Does anybody care?
The weather outside is hot. By hot, I mean 105 degree heat index, 100 degrees actual. A July sort of thing, not a June thing. I get sick from the heat easily, so my strategy has been to stay in the air conditioner and NOT. GO. OUTSIDE.
I wonder if we’re past the point of no return when it comes to climate change. If these patches of extreme heat are our “new normal”. Gardens will wither and winters will be frigid and snowy.
My psychiatrist is a bit more sanguine about climate change. He’s a libertarian and a fervent believer is progress, and he believes that scientists will find a solution, just as they did (partially) with the ozone hole. I hope he’s right — I think the wind farms that surround us may be part of the answer.
The weather is supposed to clear by tomorrow, greeting us with temperatures in the 60s and 70s. I will celebrate by going to the cafe and visiting an intern on Wednesday in Kansas City.
Let me know!
I’m trying to finish Kel and Brother Coyote Save the Planet, but I’m dealing with serious writers’ block lately. I’ve been doing marketing stuff in the morning (even if the things I have down the pipeline are stalled) and sleeping in the afternoon. This may mean I’m depressed; I don’t know. But I do know I’ve been staring at that manuscript and coming up with nothing.
NaNoWriMo, as I’ve mentioned in these pages, is a world-wide event where people attempt to write 50k words toward a novel in the month of November. Camp NaNo occurs in May and August, and it’s a smaller, less onerous event that I like to think of as training wheels for NaNo. You can pick your word count (as long as it’s over 10k) and feel free to work on something other than word count, such as editing. (Note: you can do that for NaNo as well, keeping in mind that 1 hour editing = 1000 words).
I’m going to put Kel and Brother Coyote as my Camp project (plus editing/plotting for another project) to see if it motivates me. Given that Camp (and NaNo) are a combination of gamification and camaraderie, I think I have a fighting chance.
Finishing up these old projects isn’t very motivating. In fact, I would really like to start something new. I just haven’t been inspired lately. I get motivated by relationship between people, and the short story list I have doesn’t seem to do that. (It’s very clever and science fiction-y, because my husband helped me with it.)
I want to write another novel. Real absorption into a world. But I need ideas for that as well.
If you have any ideas for a romantic fantasy, let me know!
Every morning I write this blog. There are many reasons I do this, not the least because I want that little message from WordPress that I have written the blog X days in a row (yay gamification!) I’ll explore some of the other reasons below.
I consider writing this blog my morning ritual, along with coffee, music, and getting my hair to behave. The ritual starts with racking my brain with finding a topic to write on. Then I start typing and thinking and typing. And editing as I go.
I find the practice of journaling warms me up for writing. Not just the fingers, although by the number of typos I make while typing the blog I guess my fingers need warming up.
Writing the blog warms up my mind. It trains it to write as a flow exercise, a task where time flies past me and I’m in the moment. Admittedly, blogging itself is not a flow experience because it doesn’t go on for long enough. but blogging limbers up my mind so that flow is possible.
One of my attractions to my daily ritual of blogging is that it’s a challenge. What am I going to write today? Have I written about that lately? Will anyone care about my blog? I don’t know about the latter, as I have between 11-20 readers on a regular basis and 57 followers, which suggests most of my followers aren’t reading the blog. That’s okay; I still face the challenge every morning.
How often do you blog? Daily? More than daily? Weekly? Let me know!
I notice that the sunrise this morning is not really pink — maybe more of a salmon color, but that’s not poetic, is it? “The salmon-colored dawn.” No. Just no.
“Rosy”, on the other hand, is poetic. And everyone who reads the poem or prose takes the same poetic leap and accepts the dawn as rosy.
I’m in a writer’s group on Discord, and the caffeine addiction there is real. To the point where we talk about how we make coffee and what blend we use. And heaven forbid we skip our coffee in the morning.
I haven’t met any tea drinkers, but it could be a small sample size. Do you drink tea?
The same group of writers admitted that they too have self-doubt.
There are many, many romance categories. Superhero, bad boy, playboy, alien. Sweet, steamy, hot, erotica. Friends to lovers, enemies to lovers, boy next door, strangers to lovers. Science fiction, fantasy, contemporary, historical.
And because of my self-doubt, I don’t know if I belong to any of these.
Right now, I feel like most of my writing time is spent in marketing, and I don’t even have anything on imminent publication. I’m using The Kringle Conspiracy as my hook for newsletter subscribers, so that’s out. This is all a very strange journey and I don’t know how things are going to work this fall when I’m back to work.
Do you have any observations about yourself as a writer, or if you aren’t a writer, other writers? I’d love to see you drop these in the comments!
To be a writer is to be afflicted by crippling self-doubt. It takes only a Google search of “crippling self-doubt” to confirm this. It’s not surprising. If a writer writes for an audience, they bring their works out into the daylight.
If they’re showing their friends what they’ve written, they’re afraid of being judged. Because friends often skip over the Facebook post, they’re never quite sure if they’ve been read. Because friends are often afraid to hurt someone’s feelings, they will be wary of compliments.
If the writer submits for publication, they’re afraid of being rejected — and they will often be rejected, because their work is competing against others’ writing.
There are several articles on the Internet about how to deal with self-doubt. See here and here for examples. I don’t want to hash over these excellent articles, so I’ll write from my experiences and hope the advice is helpful.
Writers aren’t the only ones with self-doubt; it crops up when we have to speak publicly, at our jobs, and any place where we step outside our comfort zones. What are your solutions for self-doubt?
Yesterday I got into a conversation with my husband where I said I wished I would get sick because then I would be able to take a break. And then I realized how wrong that sounded. Just plain wrong.
As I think I have said in these pages before, I hate doing nothing. I thrive on making things happen (as long as those things aren’t housework as much as possible.) As it’s summer, making things happen usually means working on writing, although I haven’t been feeling it lately.
So after a weekend of 90+ degree temperatures I wake up vague and weepy and I don’t think I should take a break.
If this isn’t the time to take a break, I don’t know what is.
Seriously. How do you all know when you need to take a break?
I always feel like summer is the time for waiting. Ordinary time in the church calendar, the hot days fading into each other under the relentless sun, the school year in the distance and nothing at the moment needing done. Time to relax and wait.
I an very poor at waiting.
This is the current season of my life, where I am waiting for many things — my beta readers to get back to me, answers to queries and submissions. I’m waiting for some feedback. Where to go from here. How to go forward. I want to go forward, not just sit here and wait. What am I called to do? Nothing, at the moment, and I hate it.
At this moment, I am waiting in the Westport Coffee House in Kansas City. I am supposed to be writing, and I am writing this but getting very agitated with the notion of waiting.
I need to find a way to be comfortable with waiting.
I was feeling in the doldrums yesterday waiting for a storm that never happened and frustrated with my lack of progress writing. Richard began to look for cabins at Mozingo (the city park some 5 miles away) but that’s a fruitless task in the summer at the last minute. I suggested trying to find a Kansas City boutique hotel on Hotwire so we could knock around the city.
So we did. And now we’re having a mini-mini-mini-MINI vacation (overnight) taking the Gangster bus tour and staying at the 21c, a boutique hotel formerly known as the Savoy. (thoroughly modernized alas). Hopefully, there will be a few good vibes that will help me write the remainder of my half-finished novel.
It’s been one of those summers, the ones where I want to accomplish big things, but. I can’t quite seem to wake up. I have no ideas to play with. I get no inspiration. I want to do something, but … meh.
The first thing I do to break out of the doldrums is get up, sit upright, start doing things. Like writing this blog, which has taken me three tries to write. Drink coffee. Contemplate something to break out of my routine.
Contemplating ways to get out of the house, away from the same walls, out into the open.
Something.
Time to get out of the doldrums.
Words Like Me 