Tag Archives: amWriting

Musings, Writing

There’s still time to write, #NaNoWriMo or not

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At the end of the month it’s easy to feel dejected, feel like you aren’t going to reach the goal of 50k, or whatever goal you set for yourself. So I’m here to remind you of something:

No matter how much you write in the next 8 days, if you write any words it’s more than no words.

You can keep writing even if you’re not going to reach the goals you set out for yourself. And that’s still a good thing all-in-all.

Last year a lot of people around me used the hashtag #NotSoWriMo, as a way to indicate that they were writing and joining in, but in a different way than the set goals of #NaNoWriMo.

I set up my own goal this month, which was to write every day if I could. And I’ve not been writing every day, but I’ve had the chance to learn what a good weekly writing schedule would look like for me. I also got the chance to figure out what works for me right now.

In 2010 I wrote a full 50k draft. No editing just writing writing writing. But since then I’ve not even touched that draft, even if it plays at the back of my mind occasionally. Mostly because it’s such a big draft that I didn’t try to write well. I was just trying to write it all.

I don’t necessarily think this was a bad thing for me, but I have started to learn that just trying to write a set amount of words in a set amount of time means I will spiral on meta writing or loop a lot. Instead of like when I’m writing by hand in the journal, contemplating what I’m writing and trying to craft good sentence, after good sentence. I guess it’s similar to the brick laying (Will Smith). I’ve found that for me, a well placed brick now means less work later. Imagine having to tear it all down to adjust it later. Phew.

Sorry, this went a bit off track. What I’m saying here is, there’s no one way of doing this writing thing. And I hope that you can find the encouragement and energy up keep writing.

Give yourself these last 8 days this writing month, and continue writing. Each day you write another sentence is more than you had before.

I believe in you.

Health, Musings, Writing

To Follow your own advice

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I know, it sucks. Like a lot. Coaches don’t play, you may want to yell at me, and that’s a very fair point. Yet, recognizing when you give advice you should follow yourself, it could actually help you do it. Let me explain.

Yesterday, a friend was sharing some of their struggles with their workload with their studies, and having to pretty much just put their head down and keep studying as much as possible to get through it. Which reminded me of when I had my worst crunch periods, but I was also very sick, so I had to balance everything I was doing on a knife’s edge to not completely crash. So I gave him advice based on how I took care of myself during such periods.

When I needed to crunch studies, the most important thing to me was to eat regularly and take a walk every day. At least one walk. This would depend on the level of my health, and at one point I had to just opt for much shorter walks, but more frequently both for mental and physical health reasons. I’ve gotten through the worst times, health wise, of my life while studying full time, and it’s been strange, but you pick up some interesting coping mechanisms, and one was take good care of yourself while studying.

So there I was, yesterday, unable to really go out the house and unable to take very well care of myself, and handle my physical and mental anxiety enough to get writing done as I wanted, and get resting done as I wanted. And it hit me, I wasn’t following my own advice. I knew in theory that I would be better off, if I wanted to write, if I took a walk every day. When I took a walk every day for like 14 days, I wrote two good articles in that time.

I have the proof that putting in this effort makes a difference. I got the experience, to give me the knowledge what I can do to create a better better environment for myself. And since my goal for the coming 2 years is to write, if not daily at least a majority of the week’s days, establishing a pattern and habit of treating my self as well as I’d treat my friends would be a stable foundation to start on.

So here I am, again, sharing my advice, but advice that I want to follow myself. I want to write more, and in order to be able to write, I need to take a walk at least every other day. And to not feel icky, I need to shower, and I need to remember to feed myself because my brain is doing a lot of work. I need to remember to take breaks and go up and just do something else. I need to allow myself restful sleep, even on days I haven’t written anything.

I can work on figuring out what habits work better for me. But still keep treating myself with compassion, and care. Even on high anxiety days, I can help myself through because I know that 30min walk is very likely to make me feel better, and even if it doesn’t, that would’ve been 30minutes where I didn’t have to sit and just tense up, it was 30minutes I moved my body, and 30minutes I got to breathe fresh air, and 30minutes I got to listen to a book as I took my walk. It was 30minutes that I was able to meet cute dogs, or just see the colours of the leaves change in the park. It was 30minutes that I took a little bit better care of myself instead of just wallowing in my anxiety.

And even if it doesn’t work, I can always take a nap after my walk, and try again tomorrow.

If you enjoyed this piece of writing, and would like me to be able to write them more, feel free to head over to my Ko-fi or my Liberapay and throw me a little coin.
Alternatively, check out my support page for more info.

Musings

Neurodivergent Writing for Neurodivergent Readers

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Seeing a conversation about traditional publishing, and the issues with it and how books that seems like a treat don’t make it through because traditional publishers just don’t know how to market it my mind went on a tangent.

What if we allow ourselves to write for a non-traditional audience? If you’re neurodivergent, like me, you may know that you have trouble to sit down and write some of the thoughts and stories you’d like to write because you have this idea of what traditional writing should be like.

For a while, after having a long period of severe aphasia, and memory loss, and my mind just wasn’t putting words together, I was able to write smaller sentences again, and kind of string them together into something someone could read. I could tell it wasn’t an article, it wasn’t a poem, nor musings. But in a way it could be all of those things. I was letting myself write to the little capacity I could, and it brought my joy and I could tell others saw themselves in some of it.

We tend to get hung up on what we think writing should be. Because we’ve been taught all the rules. It’s common to say that knowing the rules are needed in order to break them. And it may be true in some cases. But what if we just let go?

What if we just let ourselves write that sprawling messy story, where we don’t go from point A to B in a straight line, but we jump to D and C, maybe X and J, on our journey to tell whatever we’re telling.

Let yourself write in the way you think. And let that be it. You can always come back to it, and create something else out of it.

Don’t restrict yourself with writing the perfect lines. Just write for the joy of it.

Sometimes, when I give myself time and space to think, connect the dots and so forth, I also am able to write something down in a coherent matter, like this post i wrote just now while having breakfast, because a conversation between friends hit the right notes.

Happy writing. 😻

Musings

Writing and stuff in the New Year

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Stuff, such a good word.

This year I have a few things I want to do, one of them is write more. So here I am, on Jan 1st, writing.

I asked the community on #amWriting if they wanted to help support each other, and so many people chimed in. With both big and small writing projects. Some want to write whole novels, some just a few lines every day.

As most of you know I’m baby stepping through a lot of things in my life, so my writing will be both on here and for uni, because I can’t max out in writing everywhere. But that’s fine. I’m learning my limits and working to live within them in a healthy way, and sometimes stretching them, but that’s a post for another day.

The way this blog has worked in the past year is to mostly contain my musings, which haven’t been written down too often. I’m looking at a new routine to squeeze in writing. Basically a small session after breakfast, while having had breakfast with reading. The good thing about this combo is that reading can trigger thoughts, and I can write them down.

There are other things that I want to write this year, one is my Creative Writing Project for university (basically a BA in creative writing). I’ve decided on what I want to write and it’s going to be poetry, about my grandmother. I’ve shared my project statement draft on patreon, for patrons only, as I don’t want to get in trouble with class if I share too early.

Me and Loa are also looking into doing more with our gaming blog / channels. While he is focusing on video, I want to keep writing and probably do small reviews of games I play this year. That blog has been stagnant since I moved it to a new host, a year ago. We’ve not even updated the theme to something other than default.

What are you writing this year?