I haven’t updated this blog with new content in a long time. Both my short story and my novel have been stalled. I hope to get a habit of regular writing started again.
Why?
The blog was due to burnout. Although this blog I’ve been publishing on for more than 3 years, I’ve grown exhausted at continuing that schedule proved to be tiring.
My Steps to Solving That
I’ve begun a new content calendar to get this (and other social media) onto a more regular posting schedule. In the past, I just posted online at random times. Hopefully, I won’t from now on.
To help me to post here more often, I’ll prepare several posts before I launch them here, so I’ll have a bank of pieces to post every week. In the past, I would prepare one piece at a time; as a result, I would always have the pressure to update while the content suffered. This way, that pressure will be lessened.
That’s one piece of my new writing strategies:
Short Story/Novel
Short story collection (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
These too sat around untouched for a long time. Far too long.
The Reason for My Long Delay
The reason is also proof that I’m truly a writer: self-doubt.What is that? It’s something that many other writers have experienced (including the far-better-than-I Neil Gaiman): a voice in my head – and in many others – says that we’re not good enough, we can’t finish what we start either.
English writer Neil Gaiman. Taken at the 2007 Scream Awards. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The voice is crippling. I didn’t touch my novel for over a year as a result.
How I’m Solving That (regular writing)
Two things are helping The first is one we’ve always used for NaNoWriMo: ignore it.
There we call it our Internal Editor and do our best to not pay attention to it.
The other thing that I’m doing is that I joined a group called Ninja Writers. They have a pretty active Facebook Group [here], and also a Patreon that I’ve joined.
Ninja Writers is based off a philosophy espoused by the late Ray Bradbury:
Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens.
Photo of Ray Bradbury. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The basic idea is that every day I write for 10 minutes and I also read for another 10. The idea isn’t that new. I’m a member of another Group called 10 Minute Novelists [here], and I bought a book about starting a similar writing habit of 8 minutes per day.
Regardless of the amount of time, the important thing is to build up a regular habit of writing. I have to rebuild mine. Plus: so far, it helped me to finish the first draft of my novel, and to break my inertia on the short story for my e-mail list.
I thank Ninja Writers for that. I’m back to regular writing because of it.
I realize that I’ve said I was restarting before. I hope that this time it works.
