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Too Many Projects, Not Enough Time

I feel like I say this at least once a year. But I’ve done it again. Except it’s worse this time, because my COVID productivity has been terrible and I’ve spent a lot of time not doing anything productive (mostly playing Among Us, coloring on a phone app, and watching a LOT of YouTube videos–but not useful YouTube videos). So my productivity time has been stifled AND I’m trying to get my too many projects done. Great combination, she says sarcastically. We’ve been super busy this summer, camping and road-tripping and the like, which admittedly is not helping the productivity problem, but now things are somewhat settling down. Which means that it’s time to do random sewing crafts with the small-ish, mobile ones. I think this comes from a vague idea that, before offspring, I liked to sew, and that I should pass the knowledge on and whatnot, but in practice I do all the sewing and generally get grumpy at every one else for being absolutely no help. So then we don’t do any more sewing projects, until I get the whole passing things on idea going again approximately 12 months later. (The past couple of years we made worry pets and small owls that can be heated up in the microwave.) This year we’re going to make reversible cross-back aprons. Well, just me and the littlest one, cuz the rest aren’t interested. Certainly bigger scale than normal, but hopefully not more complicated. However, we went to buy fabric…

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December: The Creativity Sink

So, as I mentioned last month, like Siri, I too attempted Nano for the first time in many years. And I did it! It took some finessing (I wrote 7K in the course of a night to catch up at one point), but it got done, and without any fudging on my part. Every year that I am successful at Nano, I swear I’m going to keep going. Sure, not another 50K month in a row, but a significant amount, and the draft will be done in a few months, hooray! Every year it doesn’t happen. (Perhaps the worst offender of this was Shards, actually. I hit 50K at a rather privotal moment and stopped there, not even bothering to wrap up the scene. And every time I tried to go back to it, for months, I couldn’t figure out where to go and it got absolutely nowhere.) (I mean obviously it did eventually, but you’d think I’d learn.) (But apparently I haven’t.) And this is true every winning November. Despite my best intentions, I can’t seem to keep going on my Nano novel, and it doesn’t seem to matter whether things were flowing well during November or not. I’ve come up with some theories: Burnout. Maybe I’m just tried of that particular project. That doesn’t read particularly true, since I often spend several months to a year of consistent work on revisions or rewrites, but maybe! Or maybe I’m burned out on the pace and I need a break…

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Chasing Productivity

Life is much easier if you plan ahead, I’ve discovered on any number of occasions. I’m trying to do it more consistently, so I did make a plan for this blog post. My idea was to blog about an app, Productivity Challenge Timer. I’ve had it on my phone for–probably years? I’d never used it. For one, I was amused by my title of “Unrepentant Slacker” when I opened it. For two, I didn’t know how to use it. For three, I didn’t want to get yelled at by a big guy with a hammer. On Saturday, though, I went looking for a Pomodoro timer bc my phone timer is loud and I can’t change the sound to something less jarring. Since some of the stuff I need to time requires me to move around, online ones just aren’t as useful as I’d like. So I bounced around a bit looking at reviews, searched “productivity” in the Play Store, and wandered across “already installed!” Oh. Right. That thing. While I love to find new useful things (and imagine that FINALLY I have found the magic spell to Fix All!), I also dislike putting apps on my phone. I don’t want it to be so full it doesn’t work well, and I begrudge granting one more set of permissions because lork knows who’ll be looking at my stuff next…and I needed to figure something out and get to work, before I spent the whole day looking at productivity apps and then…

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Putzing About

Oh, friends, my November was gloriously productive. It was so productive I’ve gotten cocky. No doubt that will be a mistake later, but for now, I am reveling in it. So, the time goal worked out really well. I got a ton done. So I’m continuing that for December, though I’ve lowered it to 30 minutes because Holidays and so forth. So far, so good. I’m actually ahead for the month. Aside from that, I’m still working on drawing/shading/coloring classes. It’s been very interesting, though we may be getting to the point where I should stop doing classes and actually start working on projects.  I’ve also started doing some vocal skills classes. It’s been a long time since I’ve had any sort of instruction on the matter–probably high school. All the choirs since then have just assumed you know what you’re doing and left you to flounder if you don’t. So hopefully that will be useful in the future. Right now, so far, it’s been pretty basic, and also I have a cold and singing makes me cough. AND I’m sewing again, making presents for Christmas, as well as putzing around with other random projects (including patching the pile of clothes that need patching). My mother and I went to Goodwill Outlet last week (where you can buy clothes for about $1/pound) so I now have stuff for other projects should the Christmas presents go well. It’s a creative monstrosity over here. No doubt eventually I will have so many options of…

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Over-commitment October

Good morning, friends! It’s my favorite month of the year, October, which means, as usual, I have committed to too many things. Stupid month of possibility, letting me think I knew what the heck I was doing. Bah! (Actually, I made the same mistake with September, so maybe it’s fall in general. Or maybe it’s me.) I think I told you guys about the programming class. It ends at the end of the month, and I’ve reached a point in the subject matter where I just don’t quite understand what’s going on. It’s early in the week, and hopefully some of the other assignments will clarify things, but it’s still a bit frustrating. I’ve got a major edit for a repeat client. I’m almost a quarter of the way done, and probably won’t be completely done until mid-December. English isn’t his first language, though he’s spoken it for quite some time, so there’s a lot of little fiddly things to keep an eye on. Rehearsals have started for the Christmas show at my local church/community theater. I’ve been trying out for years and never getting anything except general ensemble, so you can imagine my surprise when they put me both in a small group and gave me a solo. Admittedly, I’m pretty sure I got said solo because of my range (I can sing tenor fairly comfortably) and not because of voice quality, so that’s a thing. I’m feeling pretty awkward about the whole thing, which hopefully is just cuz…

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A Creative Interlude

Good morning! Do you ever have those times when you really should be working on something, but something else comes along that sounds like way more fun? Or, like, it doesn’t matter if anything ever actually does get done, because planning is fun? And shopping for supplies, and picturing doing it, and… …anyway, this is me right now. And what I’d like to be doing, at least theoretically, is sewing. Not sure what exactly has brought this on. It’s probably a combination of having too many writing projects going, the fact that I hate half my wardrobe, and the fact that I used to sew all the time, but haven’t touched my machine in four…maybe five…years. So first I went into the planning stage. My planning stage mostly involved reading tons of blogs about upcycling clothing and starting a Pinterest board. I’ve also checked out some sewing pattern books from the library. Somewhere in the Pinterest stage I went from upcycling clothes to just making clothes from scratch. That might be because I actually did a couple of upcycling projects. The kids and me made slouch hats and arm warmers from old sweaters and hot glue, and I also took an overly large t-shirt I got from giving blood and turned it into a workout tank top. Upcycling urge conquered, I guess. So now we’re on the sewing from scratch phase. At the end of last week, the small, somewhat mobile one and I hit our local Joann’s, where I…

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End of Project Jitters

City of Hope and Ruin is out! Hooray! It’s out and it’s lovely and people have been so great about telling us how excited they are or how much they liked the book and we are very thankful for all you lovely people. And now I am free! BWHAHAHA. I mean, of course, there’s still lots to do on CoHaR. Marketing things, reviewers, guest posts and blog tours, the Goodreads giveaway which starts tomorrow, etc. We’ll be at it for months. But the frenetic pace of the past year, and specifically the last five months, is done with. FREEDOM. Of course, now that I find myself with freedom, I once again find myself confronted with a slew of options. What to work on now? Do I work on anything? Do I catch up on all the reading I didn’t do while ear-deep in revisions? At the beginning of the year, I made myself a spreadsheet, and on said spreadsheet I made a list of all the writing projects I wanted to accomplish this year, as well as what I felt was a reasonable amount of time to expect them to be done, and which months would include what projects, etc. Let me tell you how that’s gone thus far. I had a bunch of “smaller” projects slated for January-March. Marketing tweaks, short projects, etc. Not one of them has gotten done. I had that I’d finish the mostly finished draft of a different story March-May. In my infinite free time…

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Freedom!

So, as Siri talked about last month, we’ve been co-writing a novel which we’ve dubbed the Sekrit Project and have proceeded to infuriate everyone by keeping to the “secret” part of the name. And I am pleased to say that it’s more or less done, and is now in the pipeline for publication here at TDP. So it’s in the editing process, and I find myself free until we get comments back. Free! ::kermit arms:: Now, don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed writing this book. I enjoyed working with Siri. I did not so much enjoy the fact that we gave ourselves eight months to go from nothing to polished novel draft. In retrospect, that is obviously not enough time and I don’t know what we were thinking. But hooray! We did it! And I’m pleased with the story and hope everyone else likes it as much as I do. But it is nice to have a little bit more leeway in what I’m working on at any point and not have a mad dash toward the finish line. So what am I going to work on now?

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