I apologise for not
having posted since the special Halloween post. I
wasn’t feeling my best one week and then the following week I was
really busy with both my day job and writing. In relation to writing,
I didn’t make that Halloween deadline for the short horror story
I’ve been working on. I’m almost done revising it,
so I will have it ready for my critique group soon. Which is the
upside of missing that submission deadline: I have a chance to have
it critiqued. I wouldn’t have had time for that otherwise.
Writing for a
Publication’s Deadline as Motivation
I may either use
this story for another magazine accepting submissions or my next
short fiction collection that I have taken a hiatus on since last
year but plan to resume it in the upcoming one. But I think I got
much more done on the story than I would have if I hadn’t been
writing for a submission deadline and was doing it for
self-publication instead. So if you are a self-publishing author like
myself, maybe that can be a great motivator for any writing project:
aim to write it for a publication that has a deadline and then as
that deadline nears decide whether you want to continue submitting it
to the publication or if you want to self-publish it.
Limited Time and
Space as Writing Motivators
I will be forced to
get motivated with my writing even more this upcoming week. As with
last Thanksgiving, I will have family coming to visit
for a week and so will be limited not only on my time to write but on
space to write in. I live in a small apartment, yet believe family
should stay with family when they come to visit for several days,
especially when they’re closer relatives. But that is no excuse for
a writer to stop working on projects. Steven King worked in a near
closet-size wash room typing his stories on a kid’s desk when he
and his family lived in a small mobile home. So, if need be, I can
work sitting on my bed in my room with my laptop in front of me.
Laptops were made for that reason, weren’t they? Or I can go to a
local cafe or fast food joint.
Revising My Novella:
A Follow-Up to Last Year’s NaNoWriMo
I’m not doing
NaNoWriMo this year, but have been taking advantage of the time with
an alternative to it: revising my novella from last year. I
finally pulled it out of the filing cabinet at the beginning of the
month, after it had been stashed away there for nearly six months,
and started doing surface level revisions and making marginal notes
where changes in content are needed. The story is coming across as
really cheesy but then it is a first draft, my first full draft of a
novel of any sort to be exact. I printed out four of the 100 pages to
first see how it reads and determine if it’s intriguing enough to
even bother continuing with it. That’s what writing the first draft
is all about: getting a story written out completely to see if you
want to bother going on revising it or to trash it. It’s an
experimental stage that helps you decide if your idea is worth
writing about and seeking a publishing route for it (traditional or
self-publishing).
So, how do you
motivate yourself to write to completion? Do you accommodate for your
writing time and space when family and friends come to visit during
the holidays? Are you participating in NaNoWriMo or are you doing an
alternative to it? Feel free to leave your answers in the box below.
Have a Happy
Thanksgiving, and until next time!
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| Mother's ready to carve the turkey! Credit: Pixabay.com |
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