March 2022

Wowee, will you look at that! March is already gone. I feel like it was a very long month, filled with a lot of rather unpleasant things. Honestly, it's probably just because I was sucked into a really awful stress spiral where I was doing all of the things, but also couldn't keep dodging the hits that life was chucking in my direction. Fun times, fun times.

Although, it could've just felt like March was a long month because February was so short.

But Spring has arrived! 

I'm enjoying the rain. It's very soothing on these very late nights I keep staying up doing ridiculous things like writing until my eyes get too tired to focus properly.

I keep telling myself that what I need to do is go to sleep earlier so I'm not rolling out of bed and into my desk chair to log in for work (Working from home is amazing, but I may have unintentionally resurrected 18-year-old college student me to possess my fully adult brain). And here I thought that I was finally getting sleep now that I'm done with school. Seriously, late-night me has zero respect for the mom who has to get up in the morning. But I'm still doing the things, so that's good, right?

✅ Write Regularly

So, apparently I outline now. As a self-declared "pantser" for my entire life, it surprised me to discover that writing an outline is not only something that I could feel comfortable doing, but also it's something that I am really thriving at doing.

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that this outlining thing is a direct side-effect of so many years of writing academic essays and research papers. 

But it's kind of refreshing to have a moment of inspiration, know approximately where that thought should/could fit in the bigger picture and then not think it's the end of the world when I get distracted by a research rabbit hole to answer one question that might not exactly end up on the page.

Planning ahead a bit, I'm going to be using this outline to help guide me through CampNaNoWriMo in April. Word count motivation and regular writing practice: let's give it a go! My goal is to write 30,000 words in 30 days on a single project. This should, in theory, help me to have about 1/3 of the novel's first draft done at the end of the month.

I'm feeling pretty confident about this project, because I've had some major breakthroughs plot-wise. The tricky part is that it's re-writing a project that I've written and re-written before. *Fingers crossed*

Also, apparently I'm not adverse to stepping out on my major WIP to tackle a week-long obsessive writing project on something that just appeared out of nowhere and consumed my brain. It's an incredibly rough draft (seriously, some parts are written as "And then something happens here that makes the situation worse" and I have zero idea what that should be) and is actually more like an outline of something with some scenes that are more fleshed-out than others. To be perfectly honest, I don't even know what it is that I could do with it. I've used stand-in characters to short-cut characterization and development. It's not quite fanfiction because it's not about the actual existing characters, it's just that something about those characters happen to inform the ones that popped into my brain and Writer Me knows how to translate what I mean by that. Or, at least I'm hoping that Future Writer Me will be able to figure it out when it comes time to actually make something out of it.

✅ Research Grad School

Okay, so I'm definitely burnt-out when it comes to academia. Researching grad school options so that I could have better qualifications is just... too much. I don't know what the hell I want to do for a career right now any more than I did when I started the journey to gaining my Bachelor's degree. It's just been a long fucking five years and I'm tired. I'll just have to revisit this thought at a later date... Maybe. Probably. Ugh.

✅Get My Hands Dirty

Yeah, this is about gardening. I'm a big fan of planting flowers so that things can look pretty and to attract bees and humming birds. This is obviously going to be a multi-month project, but it's spring and I'm excited about pulling out all the weeds and fixing up the rather neglected garden in the front of my house, especially since my husband worked so hard last summer to re-do our front porch. I'll be updating the process/progress on Instagram because I keeping thinking that I need to use that account for something.

❎ The Food Thing

❎ The To-Be-Read Pile

Yeah, it's not really being read. I've been perusing some non-fiction books but I keep getting sidetracked by the wild bouts of inspiration that I get every time I read something that will work with a thought I have outlined for my novel.

I've also kind of run into that problem where I have too many choices in too wide of a variety of genres and types. Like, if they were all thrillers then I would just have to pick the thriller that sounds the most interesting at the moment. But I have thrillers and romance and poetry and YA fantasy and zombies and mythological retellings and novels in verse and I haven't dared crack open Go Tell The Bees That I Am Gone because that book is so effing big and I can't help but think I'm not going to remember where the last one left off... and it's a thing.

Anyway, this is the part where I want to say something kind, hopeful, and heartfelt. But I'm tired. The world is just dragging me down and I feel like I've reached the end of my capacity for maintaining this irrational level of keeping it all together. So I'm gonna go work on my in-progress 1,000 piece Disney Villainous puzzle (pics to be posted to Instagram upon completion) and drink my coffee and just exist for a bit.