Where the knots in tales become untangled…
Click HERE for the Audio Edition!
Good grief.
Um… well… *sigh* Yeah, I don’t feel like I did very well this year. I didn’t really accomplish any of my 2018 goals. Mostly I’ve been sinking, treading water, sinking again… Been sleeping too much (but not well), eating too much, and generally feeling frustrated and worn down. I’m trying to keep a positive outlook, but at the moment I’m hard-pressed to remember successes or positive aspects of the year.
Click HERE for the Audio Edition!
Around this time of year, a lot of people complain about the over-commercialization of the holidays. While I really do enjoy wrapping and unwrapping gifts, I agree that it has gotten way out of control. But what I don’t hear about is the over-commercialization of hobbies and passions, usually via the rising gig economy.
The problem with this is that it seems like anything and everything can (and should) be turned into money. It may not be a substantial or steady source of income, but it does dangle the tempting carrot-myth of “making a living doing what you love” in front of discouraged and disillusioned creatives such as myself. It also turns the word “opportunity” into a guilt-trip. If you’re doing something you love for free, you’re missing an opportunity to make money from it. I mean, if you’re doing it anyway, you might as well try to get paid for doing it, right? Passing up the chance to market yourself is considered just plain stupid. This is the capitalization of passion.
Click HERE for the Audio Edition!
National Novel Writing Month is over for another year. I was pretty excited to start, but had to drag myself, bruised and battered, to the finish line. Between the growing gloom of winter, getting sick every single weekend, and the increasingly devastating hormonal flux that comes the week before monthlies, I got 10,000 words behind and never properly made up for that. It’s technically complete, but I don’t feel like I have much of a novel.
This could be a complete misconception on my part. I haven’t actually gone back yet to look over what I wrote. There are a few scenes I remember which are pretty good, but I had to throw in a lot of notes and word-vomit to make it to 50,000 words. Even though I reached the NaNoWriMo word count goal, I’m not sure if I earned it. I certainly don’t feel like I did.
Spells in Sepia has potential, but right now I don’t think I have a real plot. It’s just a random assortment of disjointed scenes and concepts. Not a lot actually happening, just a bunch of internal monologuing from my main character. I don’t feel like I have the world-building under control because I haven’t done enough research into the places where the story is set. I’m just tossing out nonsense, which means I’ll have to go back and make sense of it all, and that prospect is utterly daunting right now. The thought of having to continue writing, then go back and kill all my darlings, then repeat the whole thing over and over and over again makes me want to curl up in a tiny ball and start whimpering. The thought of then having to query and look for agents makes me want to crawl into the deepest, darkest cave I can find and start screaming.
Right now, writing isn’t very fun. And I really want it to be fun again. But I also want to, you know, finish stuff. Which I can’t do unless I keep going through this process of rolling the rock of Sisyphus up an endless hill.
So… yeah. Sorry this isn’t the uplifting peon of victory you may have been waiting for. I was hoping for one too. At the moment I’m just exhausted, discouraged, and so behind on so many things.
But at least I can binge-watch my Blu-ray of Good Omens now.
Audio Edition Coming Soon!
There’s a reason I’m not usually a pantser. Mostly it’s because I write myself into a corner. But it’s also because I hate feeling like I’m being inaccurate, even when it’s just the first draft. Or I just hate feeling like I’m floundering about, retreading old tropes, taking the easy way out.
Spells in Sepia (SiS) is tackling a lot of new ground for me, and it might be more than I can handle. I’m trying to just let go and write, but at the same time, I feel like I’m missing a lot of narrative opportunities, directions, and ideas because I don’t know enough about what I’m writing.
Unlike most of my other projects, this is an urban fantasy, so it’s supposed to take place in the real world. Our real world. For the most part, anyway. But there are a few hitches: Time, Place, and Character Career.
Hi everyone! Yes, a random bonus entry in the middle of the week because I’m actually really excited about NaNoWriMo this year and want to keep up the momentum. I’m trying to get everything ready so I don’t have a bunch of loose ends hanging over my head on November 1st. Which means I’ve been cleaning and organizing while trying not to get sidetracked by episodes of Sapphire & Steel or by the cuteness of my kitties:
So, to keep myself on track and accountable, here is my goal sheet for National Novel Writing Month 2019. (Note that a “session” consists of writing at least 500 words.)
Date: 10/30/2019
Top Priority: Spells in Sepia (NaNaWriMo 2019 project – urban fantasy novel)
Action Steps:
On The Radar:
Audio Edition Coming Soon!
Being an English major is a little of a running gag in my family. Out of all my siblings, I have the highest level of education and (so far) the most years in school. Yet I also make the least amount of money and have the lowest expectation of career advancement. Usually it’s just good-natured teasing, the way one expects from siblings. I indulge in it myself from time to time, but even my self-deprecating humor has taken on a sharper edge. As the years roll on, it just doesn’t seem funny anymore.
I recently read an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal entitled, “Is Majoring in English Worth It?” The contents were pretty much what I’d expected: a half-mocking look at how the value of an English degree has declined dramatically even as the cost of college exponentially increases, making it “the most regretted college major in America.” But I hadn’t expected the intense wave of bitterness that swept over me, a deep sense of resentment that something I spent six years, thousands of dollars, and untold amounts of stress attaining, a skill that I am good at, can be summarily dismissed as the butt of a bad joke.
So, like a good little Millennial, I shared some of my frustration on social media:
I got some sympathetic faces in response, which was about all I had expected. But then my friend David asked a very poignant question:
“If you had a time machine, what would you do differently?”
Greetings everyone! Just letting you know that there won’t be a substantial Cat’s Cradle entry this week due to the fact that I’ll be on a long-awaited and much needed vacation. My brain is way too frazzled to create anything really worth reading and I’m so far behind on Story A Day and a dozen other things… so I’m packing a stack of books and heading for the beach. I’ll be incommunicado for about a week. Everything should be back on schedule when I return and hopefully I’ll be in a much better, more creative frame of mind. Stay awesome!
Audio Edition Coming Soon!
Once again, I find myself in an odd position where I have too many different fictional universes filling my brain, none of which is dominant enough to drive out the others and leave a clear path for inspiration.
So, as you can see, I don’t know what (if anything) I’m going to get done, which is a little concerning with NaNoWriMo on the horizon… I do have a little time, so we’ll see how things go. (But seriously, I cannot wait for my upcoming week of vacation. Kat desperately needs a recharge before winter hits.)
Til next time…
Hi folks!
Sorry about the late and rather short entry this week. Summer schedule at the day job has kept me on my toes and I keep using up my free time to rest and recharge rather than getting anything substantial accomplished. My goal for Camp NaNoWriMo this month was 31 hours of editing, but I only managed to reach 10, and most of that was typing I should have gotten done in June. So I’m about a month or more behind everything, but the forward motion does continue, albeit at a crawl. And as summer winds down, hopefully there will be enough opportunities to recharge my low battery, at least enough to get me through to the beach in September.
I hope to give you a more substantial Cat’s Cradle entry and better report of my artistic endeavors in August.
Audio Edition Coming Soon!
I’m sitting on the front porch in a set of “I Love Coffee” pajamas, basking in the summer warmth. The wrens bring food to their babies nesting in one of the hanging flowerpots. (They are surprisingly loud for such little birds.) A copy of Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress sits on a stool beside me, the bookmark nestled almost a quarter of the way through. It has been a quiet, lazy kind of day, and I dread returning to my day job tomorrow morning. Feels like I could use a few more days like this to just…chill. Reorganize. Reboot.
The Cat's Cradle : On Hiatus! 