Home Posts tagged "revision"

Tag: revision

Building in Procrastination

Heya, friends! I hope everyone enjoyed Across Worlds with You! (And if you missed it, all nine parts are now available in the freebies section!) Here we are, mid-February, about a month and a half into the year (which is a little crazy if you think about it). Last month I talked about why I thought everyone tends to be so productive at the beginning of January as well as my goals for the year, which including adding in side goals in reading, art, and video games and whether or not I thought that was going to be a bad idea. And now that we’re six weeks in, I’m going to say–I think they were a good idea. I can’t always concentrate on my big project. I’m not sure anyone is actually capable of 100% focus on their main project at all times. I’m tired from work, or I only have ten minutes before I need to go do something, or my brain is just fried in general. What I found last year was that when I hit these times I tended toward binging YouTube or playing hours of Minesweeper or something along those lines, which was frustrating because I was not doing what I wanted to be doing and also wasn’t enjoying my time doing whatever it was I was doing instead. So what I’ve found with the addition of the side goals is that instead of defaulting to the dumbest thing possible when I can’t work up motivation,…

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Imposter Imposter Syndrome?

Hidey-ho, friends. Pay no attention to what day of the week it is. Let’s talk about Imposter Syndrome. The Oxford dictionary describes it as “the persistent inability to believe that one’s success is deserved or has been legitimately achieved as a result of one’s own efforts or skills.” Writers run into this periodically, even famous, best-selling authors. Not necessarily about works of the past, but current works. “Oh, sure,” one might say, “that book is great, but this new book is trash, I’m a hack, it was pure luck that I have gotten anywhere,” etc. But what I’ve found is…sometimes that feeling is justified? There have been times where I have written something that has felt like pulling teeth, that feels pedantic and repetitive and uninspired. It feels bad. Just bad. And while most stories do go through a “this is bad and I am a hack” phase (normally in the middle somewhere), sometimes something is truly bad, and when you give it to your betas or your critique group, they do come back and say “oh, no, you’re right, something’s missing, this isn’t working.” It’s not Imposter Syndrome if you’re right, and it actually is bad, right? So if you’d asked me last week if I was a good judge of whether my own writing was actually bad, or just me going through the tough phase of the story, I would had said I was pretty good at telling the difference. However, I spent the last weekend pulling apart…

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Why Does My Brain Hate Productivity?

Howdy, friends! How’s the new year treating you? We’re supposed to have a massive snowstorm starting tonight, so that’s fun, she said sarcastically. I think I told you guys this at some point, but at the end of 2021 I sat down with myself and had a heart to heart about what I was doing with my life, and I came out of that knowing that a lot of the things I’ve been working on for the last decade have been to either avoid or to justify a story I’ve been working on for literally ever. (Decades.) Because it’s scary, to put something you’ve put a lot of time and heart into, in case it fails. Because sometimes it’s hard to separate what you create from yourself, and if something you worked really hard on does badly, you can take it as a reflection of yourself. Anyway. I have, traditionally, set many different goals, normally on a monthly basis. Writing goals, drawing goals, reading goals, video game goals, workout goals. We’re talking, like, twenty goals per month. But what I’ve found, recently, is that I do these other goals instead of working on the above story, because hey, I’m being productive still! But I’m also still avoiding the main thing for the same reasons. So, for January 2023, I set just a single goal: work on my revision. Surely putting all my focus onto my main goal would make me do it, right? Well. I mean, I am working on…

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