I know it has been sometime since I last posted, but I have had to rearrange my priorities and posting here is low on the list. I’ve mentioned this in the past, but the website is the last priority when it comes to writing. With work taking up 40-50 hours a week, I have to look at what will help me excel and achieve what is most important to me: becoming a full time writer. In order to do that, I need to read, write, and edit. My goal for each week is to read or write for forty hours. I have fallen short on that goal because summer hits like a giant unproductive hammer.
During summer, I focus heavily on spending time with my family and friends. This is healthy for me, but bad for my dream as I cannot write when I am with my family or friends because I am there to spend time with them. So I burn the candle on both ends. Which led me to burning out and entering a state of low productivity.
Then, add in the fact that I was typing upwards of sixty hours a week (between work and fiction writing), and I end up with a consistent pain in my forearm which is a flare up of tendentious and carpel tunnel from rock climbing. As I am typing this, I stopped work on a short story and novella (manuscript 7 is still being outlined and has been bumped to manuscript 8 because a different short story got too long and is now considered manuscript 7); I stopped writing because the pain was flaring up and keeping me from getting into my groove where the world ceases to exist and I live in what I’ve created. After a couple of sentences I have to take a break and stretch my left arm so I can type a little more. This leads to disjunctive writing, which is fine for a post, but horrible for a cohesive story.
The ramifications from not being able to write as much as I want has sent me into a positive feedback loop where I keep spiraling further and further from what makes me happy. But, I keep plugging away and swimming for the surface, and I think I can see the shimmering waves above me (it’s called Fall or Autumn (if you are pretentious)). I’ve begun to go back to the basics in order to leave this lack of writing behind: journal writing, reading non-fiction, and day dreaming in the worlds I’ve created.
So, I am alive, I am writing (albeit not as much as I want to), and I have a bunch of half-finished posts I will flesh out over the next couple of weeks so there is more activity here. I’ll also talk a little more about manuscript 8 (this was manuscript 7) and the new manuscript 7.