Abandon Outside Expectations

If my 'new plan for a new year' did anything, it wasn't simply making me set myself up for crippling failure, but reevaluating how I treat myself as a writer. I've done a lot of advice blogs, not coming from the place of an expert, but simply meant to help other writers to remember to be as flexible as their guys tell them to be.

So what about those lamenting they flit around and never finish anything? I could say that maybe the tides will turn, maybe you can try to try some methods that have worked for me. Still, you see the baffling overflow of bloggers and articles whining about how the overflow of ego-driven advice.

Where?

Seriously, where? This is the same thing that happened when Bird Box came out on Netflix. I saw tons and tons of memes complaining that social media is raving about it, but somehow, 99.9% of the people on my feed hadn't even bothered to see it. Given, I've got maybe 300-something friends on FaceBook and fuck Twitter, but the things that overflow into my feed sometimes assume we're all absorbing the same shallow sources.

A writer's bane is, what then; the burden of choice? That, in our most vulnerable times, we're possibly just drinking in the most click-baity articles while downing wine and using that fishing expedition as an excuse to claim we're 'blocked' or 'burnt-out'?

Because every writer I actually talk to has the equivalent of idea diarrhea (sorry that the analogy has come to this...) Even when we're not writing, we're endless streams of possibility. It's not anathema, to shy away from the pen or the keyboard. It's process and how you feel about it is contrary to how it actually works, more often than not.

The days where I write or edit the most are often days where I feel like, eh, I'll just poke at it for 15 minutes because I'm not feeling it. I never remember how much I enjoy it until I push it.

Sometimes I'm right and it doesn't take off, but this is one of those instances where I'm happy to be wrong.

Maybe it's because I went into the new year gently. I've finished all of the oral surgery, caught a bad cold and still, I'm hoping to get through the nitty gritty of editing and formatting. I'm really hoping to honor my mom's birthday with another book release, but I'm not going to panic if I have to adjust that goal. 

I know that doesn't sound gentle; the breaking of jaw and tooth, the wracking of coughs and the pile of publishing prep, but that's exactly how I see it. I've had to put off exercise goals so my body could heal first. I've gracefully chosen sleep when I really want to edit. I've taken my own advice, time and again, because the advice is only frustrating or useless to others if I'm just bleating the same shit other writers are apparently blogging about without applying it successfully myself.

Go ahead and blubber over click-baity advice while inebriated on your alcohol of choice sometimes. It's not the best advice I can give and it makes for a sad party, but what is good or bad advice comes with how well you mesh with, test or rebel against it. Don't let anything intimidate you against self-improvement. Don't let the pretentious goals of 'perfection' or 'mastery' push you off of being a story teller, no matter the medium you choose.

It is what it is. Sometimes the simplest truths are that plain. I can get flowery at times, but underneath the flower bed is a simple base of soil, a self-sustaining ecosystem that doesn't need me throwing fertilizer (or salt) down to feel like I'm doing enough.

Don't smother the garden. I can't stress enough that what keeps me steady on the path is being okay with not knowing every stone, not freaking out at every worm.

And while I heal, I'll be gentle, which includes busting my ass on a few pavers in my personal garden. Whatever works.

I may not be consistently blogging, but I'm at peace with that. It isn't a priority but I'll make it one when the time is right. Once a week sounds like a modest goal for now.

Aw, Shucks...

My scheduled posts went a little on the dark and heavy confessionals, but NaNo is my month of isolation and I have to admit, UnHeard is becoming a voice for themes in my life that aren't light and pretty. There are moments of humor, moments of lightness and kindness, but like many of the themes in this series, I wanted to be as honest as I could about what these characters might go through, not just due to disability but how the fantasy version presents issues that I do have to create without any context in realism to go by.

It's exciting, as it always is, but it also builds a sense of urgency. No matter how ambitious my word count is this month, I won't even by halfway done with my draft this month. I engineered each of these books to exceed 200K words. Not with fluff or rambling, but with actual plots, structure and development. How do I know? Well, I couldn't have said so prior to writing UnSung, but once I stopped looking at word count and just developed it, I found that the stories I wanted to tell naturally tended towards large word counts. And this coming from a skeletal writer who used to struggle with working off of a frame at all!

Truly, I'm excited to put this one down where it stops and go back to refining UnSung for its final forms. No small task. A single book three times the size as the average book in my first series and I need to make at least two full editing passes before I'll even consider publishing.

I make it sound like I wasn't careful the first time around.  Eeeeee, so not true. I might even say I was way *too* careful in those days. I can recall fully passing through each one upwards of five times, wondering if the deliberate rush in the beginning would hurt it or not. It originally wasn't intended to be a novel after all, so I struggled with the first one the most. The others came more naturally. I was turning my life around, getting healthier and WHAM BAM ZOINK those drafted up so quick that I was skeptical that they could even be coherent. It wasn't until towards the end of the series that I dialed back the obsessive urge to pass through 'editing' that resulted in zero changes... repeatedly.

Nevertheless, I'm planning to take a short break after NaNo and another around Christmas. I'll crunch some more of the everything in between the New Year and the release of Kingdom Hearts 3, aka Soul Steal Month. After that, I plan to enjoy marathoning again, something I haven't done since the letdown that was Final Fantasy XV. Only so crushing because such an otherwise beautiful game with great mechanics was flattened by a limp story. lol I do have a Selective Gamer blog floating around with my handful of reviews that go into this more, so I'll spare the rant here.

So! As we reach the end of NaNo, congratulations to all of the participants and I encourage everyone to try to fit it into your future! I'll post my final word count (and I only count the novel, not the endless blog posting I do) and my graphics in a later post. Post yours in the comments below! In fact, do your victory laps everywhere you get permission! You've earned it!

Happy New Year!

I've always found the idea of resolutions to be fraught with far more disappointment than encouragement. Life doesn't let you plan for death and loss or the sweeping thrill of sudden joy either. It just doesn't, so those timed goals can feel like an impediment. 

You know me-- always with my ambitious lists. One thing I don't do is put a definite time limit on them. I don't say with any promise that any year will be great. Although I often start a new goal on a Monday (which is often my favorite day of the week because of that), I don't beat myself up when Wednesday night makes me realize my weekly goals might have been over-ambitious. 

Things get done. In their own time. Sometimes it's a lot less than you wanted, sometimes it's a lot more than you hoped. I don't wake up demanding a promise of a good day. There are things I have to actively do or avoid or just face in getting through each one. At the end of each day, I like to look back on it and tally my victories and defeats and do better.

I definitely don't plan for breaks. It's the one thing I absolutely suck at. It's not that I don't know how to relax, it's just that there is actually so much that I fully want to do. Sometimes I go weeks before I realize I'm probably an insufferable cunt because I haven't touched a video game in forever. I don't necessarily regret it but it then becomes an immediate priority. Yes, on my list of priorities, dreams and family often come first, but nothing is locked in place. At any time, video games might take the top spot because I need to inspire my work or just need to enjoy the fruits of someone else's labors.

You probably beat yourself up when you think about how selfish that sounds in your own life. Socially, we've been geared to pump out a top five list that sounds agreeable. It's one thing to do that for the pageantry of conversation, but one of the reasons Americans are so laden with mental illness--  we feel so guilty when our actions don't fall into this impossible ideal that we neglect what had been groomed into us as a luxury rather than an actual need.

Don't know about you, but becoming a ball of stress never did me any good and it certainly didn't make me useful to those around me.

So go into the New Year with that in mind. If you must make resolutions, make them flexible. If you want to lose weight, great. Don't put a number on it. Make sound and workable lifestyle choices that take into account that you are human. Overwork and injury make you less than productive if not useless. If you want to finish that book, go for it. If you barely make it to the end of 2018 with a legible draft, you still did far more than the person who didn't start at all. Take into account the hurdles you faced and figure out what you need to do to press on.

Try not to make your goals a slow walk to the guillotine. You might face some crippling adversity or you might catch a lucky break. Humble yourself to all of it. If you base your next goals off of your very best week, you're probably going to slam into a wall. Rock bottom sucks but I like to think of an old lesson I learned as a child. You don't build your house on sand, you build it on a rock. Rock is your foundation. You don't stop there or try to dig through it, you build up. Think of what will keep your next house stronger.

I know life is tough. You won't hear me reflect on all that's gone wrong in my life because those were footnotes. I will deal with chronic pain and mental glitches my whole life and I've learn to stop fighting against them, but to work them to whatever advantage I can suck out of them. I have become an intuitive and deep person through those bumpy spots. I've become the sort of person that people know they can talk to because I have no desire to abuse the vulnerabilities of others. I protect others as preciously as I've protected myself but I don't hold anyone back either. I know it sounds like I'm tooting my own horn but you should know that once you can tear through the fog, there's a bright side somewhere. Yeah, sometimes there's a lot of fog and some pretty terrifying and impossible pain. There are parts where I was sure I should give up. The longer I endured, the sweeter the air on the other side. Even when it left me boneless and weak, I was glad just for the ragged breaths I could pull into my lungs.

Maybe I'm just shit at telling time but I don't weigh my success by the rotations of the earth. It can be staggering to reach beyond yourself, stretching beyond your home, your town, your country, the earth and out into the universe. You wouldn't take on all of that at once, so don't treat time like a thing of convenience either. You are an amazing creature of so many possibilities, just reach each day, even if it's just the length of your own arm and grab for something. Treat each day like a new start, the beginning of your potential. 

I had a humble start. Touching base with my handful of dear friends through messages, doing the work/play labors of love... That's the short version. I made some Perler bead crafts, finished the last of the simple color basing for my third book, read some of my friend Liz's story and wrote a few hundred words for UnSung. Woke up at 1:30 PM, braved the cold to walk to the store and run into my favorite Kroger employee and friend Landon. Got home, made hazelnut coffee then made some Omaha Steaks with my family, courtesy of the holiday gift from my aunt. It was a humble day, but the absolute perfect start if I could ask for one. If this day could really set the tone for what I want from the 'year', that would be everything I could ask for.

What I want to leave you with is this: reword your day. If your day sucked, rewrite it in a positive light. Sometimes your car breaks down, you get the worst news of your life and there really is no silver lining. This is where artists often work some magic. There are lessons there, ones that seem impossible to paint with any light, but trust me, it's possible. It's also been my number one survival tool. Sometimes it take a week, a few months, a year before I am able to see value, but that's the art of life. Losing my mom was soul-crushing, displacing, but there was something there, waiting to push me ahead. I wish I could name it but laboring to do so wove its magic. It's not because my mom wanted it or because I was moving on in her honor. Those things felt so trite where possibility was concerned. Perhaps it was more like the pieces of her and the pieces of me reordered to make a new picture possible. Somehow all the pieces, no matter how fucked up, they still manage to fit. I could have let them be wasted or collect dust, but I didn't.

That's what matters. If you're going to collect anything in life, put it to use. If it's not useful to you, find it a home. Sometimes the answers are deceptively simple, only the journey to arrive there coloring them with true meaning. Do quotes ever mean the exact same thing to any of us? Yet something resonates there, doesn't it?