Good morning Blogland! It’s another chilly, damp, and blustery day here in the Pacific Northwest. From my desk I can watch the bushes in our front yard shudder and shake in the wind, and it makes me grateful for my cozy office.
Speaking of! I’ve made some updates to the space, slowly but surely bringing the vision to life. I’ve added another bookshelf, this one to display
beloved knickknacks and keepsakes, and to display my growing collection of magazines and books that contain my writing. It is surreal to have them on display and it makes me smile every time I see it.
I’ve also added a rug and a hanging Turkish style lamp to the converted closet. All that’s left is to get the decor up on that wall and then this room is officially DONE! It only took seven years…
Last Week
- Write 2x/week
- Send Newsletter
- Writing Admin/Submissions
How'd I Do?
- Write 2x/week
- Nope. I did get one writing session in on Thursday, after my haircut, so that’s good!
- Send Newsletter
- Yep! If you were signed up before like, 9pm Wednesday, it should be in your inbox. If you’re feeling the FOMO, might I offer you a newsletter sign up?
- Writing Admin/Submissions
- Yes! I spent the better part of two hours researching and sent five different stories to eleven different places. Whew!
Weekly Word Count: 1,140
Even without a migraine I’d be satisfied with this output. But when I take into consideration that I was out of commission for four out of seven days… hell yes! 2023 is off to a good start! I’m proud of myself for getting the newsletter story finished and narrated. I made my readers a priority and got it done. It feels good.
I won’t lie, when I sat down to write on Thursday, I was a little nervous. It’d been over a month since I’d worked on the novel. I hadn’t even been listening to its playlist. I was pretty removed from the project, or at least I thought I was. But I wrote over 1,100 words in an hour, it came easy despite feeling a little stilted. By the end of the writing session I was back in the swing of things and ready to rock.
Which is why I stopped. Gotta quit when you’re ahead and leave a little something you want to come back to!
Honorable Mentions
There were a few happy little things that happened this week that weren’t related to any of my goals. But I want to share them because I think it’s easy to focus on what isn’t working and what’s hard, or all my anxieties. It’s all too easy to skip over the little joyous moments.
- I signed the contract for “In the Librarian’s Garden”
- I don’t know why, but I always get a little thrill when I sign a contract. I print them out and keep them in a file folder in the organizer on my desk. Within easy reach to look and see, “oh yeah, I am a published author.”
- I did Day 1 of Yoga with Adriene
- If you aren’t familiar with Yoga with Adriene, well, she’s amazing. It’s basically an at home yoga practice on YouTube, and each year she does a 30 Day Yoga journey in January. The idea is to do yoga with her (and her 11 million+ subscribers) every day. I’ve done it in the past and I struggle to fit it into my routines. My body felt great, but my mental health tanked because I was so sleep deprived by the 5:30 wake-up required to squeeze it in. So this year I’m devoting Saturday mornings to yoga. I’ll add other sessions throughout the week as desired.
- I FaceTimed with my grandma
- I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, but I’m in pretty consistent communication with my grandma. During the height of the pandemic we were talking on a weekly basis, and I still try and talk to her at LEAST once a month. But when I was planning my trip to AZ back in November, I stopped calling her because I needed to keep the trip a secret. I can’t keep a secret to save my life, so I couldn’t talk to her, like, at all. Now that the trip has come and gone (the surprise went flawlessly!) we’re getting back to a call routine. I am incredibly lucky to have such a strong relationship with my grandma in my adult life, and I absolutely love our calls. That woman is a hoot, let me tell you.
What's Next?
- Write 2x/week
- Queries
- Finish reading a book
- Apply for workshops
I already have two writing sessions scheduled in my planner for this week, so I’m feeling pretty good about getting some words down this week. I might be able to squeeze queries into today but I’m pretty busy with household type stuff on Sundays. I only have to send two, thankfully, but still. They take time.
I’m reading two books at the moment, The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern and American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land by Monica Hesse. I really want to finish one of them this week because I have a stack of library books I need to get to, and a work book club book I need to finish by the 23rd that I haven’t even started yet… Whew! It’s gonna be a reading heavy month.
January is application season in the writing world. Things like Viable Paradise, Clarion West, Odyssey, and a bunch of other grants and fellowships open up for applications right about now. Which means I need to do some research, compile a list, then figure out all the various requirements, edit/update my application documents, etc., etc.,
These things can take just as long as querying, and while I’ve done my best to sort of create templates for a lot of the sorts of documents needed, there’s always a lot of customization for each organization. Of all of this week’s goals, this is the one most likely to get partially done, or not done at all. It isn’t fun, you know?
So, yeah. That’s what’s up. I’m really digging the ease and sense of flow I’ve entered 2023 with. Feels like some Jedi shit, and I am here for it. I’ll be back on Wednesday with the return of Outings! so be sure to keep an eye out for that.
Until then, Bloggarts!
BZ
