Sleep, Writing, and Crafting

 I haven't made as much progress as I wanted on my two stories. This is mostly because the level of my motivation has fluctuated over the past couple weeks. My sleep schedule has gone wonky, and I'm learning to settle into playing Pathfinder on Friday nights, two things that mess with my motivation. Honestly, though, it's mostly the sleep issue. Insomnia sucks.

This year, I'm tempted to enter Nano. To do that, I'd have to work on something I've got enough of an outline on, and that means it would be the gay romance, and I'm afraid I'll burn out on it. It's something I'm thinking about, though, and it would be kind of nice to do this rewrite during Nano since the original draft was written in November during the first week of Nano, even though it wasn't an "official" Nano project.

Either way, I'll be getting my words on DH01 and DOTSC01, and transcribing Front. Oh, and that's coming along quite nicely, that transcription. It's both just as sucky and not as sucky as I thought it was, in different ways. Most of the non-sucky parts come in the form of my technical skill with the story. Though that's definitely improved (along with everything else) over the years, I'm consistently surprised by how well things are written in Front, for one of my earliest works.

Otherwise, the crafting bug has bitten me. I've been working on a new quilt (yeah, I started another project—but this is normal for me) that I found a tutorial about online. It's called Pins And Paws, and comes from a quilt company based in Missouri. I find that interesting, because that's where my dad was from. It's funny how things circle around like that. 

Many Tasks at Once

 So the past month has been more successful writing-wise than previous months. I think this in part is because I've trimmed back my writing to a minimum of 250 words and no more than 500 per session. Before, I was writing as much as I wanted. I blasted through scenes and would write for two, three, four days in a row, be dry for the next week. Keeping my wordcount to a low range helps me remain interested without burning me out.

Another thing I think that's helped is that I've added other writing tasks to my roster. 250-500 words a pop on one project wasn't really enough. It felt like a warm-up, so I added a second project. The second project, DOTSC01, has the same range of wordcount as the first, which works well. It also helps prevent bouncy brain where I hop from one project to another in an endless round of distracted writing. 

That worked so well that I decided that it may be a good idea to add another writing task to my list. Hence working on the handwritten story from years ago. This tale of yore is called, Front, or My First Completed Novel Evar!!!, and it has the seeds of my current writing in it. I'm transcribing it directly—not making any corrections—and adding commentary that makes me laugh at least.

And, as if that wasn't enough to have on my list of writing tasks, I decided to rework an old gay romance I wrote years ago. I think I wrote the original draft of this particular story in November of 2009. At the time, I was not participating in NaNo, but I managed to slam out just over 80k words in about 6 days, if I remember right. It's got some major issues. At the time, I didn't know how to handle conflict, hence this reworking of the story. I'm outlining it in Scapple right now. 

Having a number of tasks seems to be working well for me. My writing mind is calmer than it's been for years, and I feel like I'm making progress on everything. I'm having fun too, which is important to me. And, best of all, writing slow brings out detail I wouldn't otherwise be able to include. I'm quite pleased.

So that's where things stand in the writing world. My mental health is doing well with regular dosages of all my psych meds, which is good, and I'm very faithful with taking them at a regular time. I'm also looking into other ways of earning money, primarily by hawking my handcrafts that I make with sewing and crocheting. Things are going well!