Update Day: Taking Action

Usually, Update Day is on the last Friday of the month, but even though last Friday really sneaked up on me, I actually did remember. It's just that I've been so crazy busy this month that I had my first mini burn-out on Friday and that lasted straight into the weekend.

Yes, I'm fully aware that having the first burn-out of the year within the first month of the year has to be some sort of record. But let me explain.

I managed to rest for all of three days before the extra jobs (as in the ones not associated with my main contract) came in. And boy did they. I had something like a bumper month where I never had fewer than two jobs to do at any one given time, and all of them were on short deadlines.

The problem with that was... I need to work a certain number of hours at the contract job to ensure I get the monthly income I need to make rent etc. and my editing work just seriously started cutting into my work hours. Except... if I only did my editing work that came in, I wouldn't make rent. So there was the problem.

I didn't want to let anyone down, but I also didn't want to not get my contract hours in. So.... I started working between 18 and 20 hours per day (including weekends) to get everything done. I managed that, but then had to increase my daily contract work hours to make up the shortfall because the editing still took up most of two weeks.

And then I suddenly had three projects that I had to finish writing in a week (plus the research). This I managed. But I literally had to work non-stop on Friday to get everything in.

So when I was done, and I still had my blog post to write, I just felt like crying.

At which point I decided to give myself the entire weekend off with no screens (except Netflix) so that I could recover.

Fortunately for me, I did.

But the thing is, it made me realize that I had to change something for my own well-being. 

I worked until I was exhausted and that also made me feel sick. And if I kept it up, I definitely would have derailed in some way or the other. But that did give me the impetus I needed to make a change I'd been worried about for months now...

My freelance rates and turnaround times. 

See, when I got started, I really stressed how fast I can work and how relatively inexpensive I was. It was my way of getting into the market. It was good, and for quite some time, I never felt the impact. First, because I didn't have anything else to do. Then because I basically entered a quiet editing time while working on my contract. 

But this month when everything crashed together, I realized that I could no longer deliver work in seven days unless I was compensated for the fact that I was taking time away from my other contracts. 

So I completely restructured the way I charge for my work, which you can check out on Fiverr. 

I used to be somewhat worried about making this change. What if my clients didn't come back? What if I didn't get any more orders? 

But the last month has shown me that I'm willing to only work on my contract rather than 1) burn out because I have too much to do or 2) take a knock on my income because I wanted to keep my editing prices low.

So that's basically what my January was about. How about you? Are you also working on changing things this year? How is it going?

Do One Thing.

Right now, it's feeling like I'm on the cusp of something new. Sure, I have a lot of fallout to deal with, but for now at least, it's not looking like I have any new curveballs coming my way.

This is great, of course.

But at the same time, it's feeling a lot like I'm emerging from a bomb shelter after a nuclear winter has passed.

I mean... where do I even begin?

It's daunting to face the task of rebuilding something. Of trying to regroup and get back on even footing. Especially when your somewhat traumatized mind keeps whispering that things are going to go back to hell any second now.

Did I ever mention I'm not an optimist? Can you tell?

Seriously, though, I do realize that I have to believe that my five years of famine have come to at least some sort of an end. Which means I should be looking forward again and moving my way in that general direction.

But man. Moving forward is a lot of work. At the moment, the work is physical, emotional, and psychological. Physically, I have a ton of unpacking to do. Emotionally and psychologically, I'm working toward letting go of five years' worth of crap so I can heal and move on. While dealing with a mind that very much wants to jump into fight-or-flight mode at the smallest opportunity.

Still, the past few days, I've... started feeling like my old self. By this I mean the person I was about three years ago where I felt battered, but firmly believed that I'll still be able to achieve something. I'm hoping that, if this was an action movie, I would be getting up around now to kick life's ass after it gave me a pummeling.

Time will tell whether this is indeed what's happening, but in the meantime, I'm sticking to the one thing I've learned by necessity.

Do one thing. 

Even if that's the only thing I manage to do in a day, at least I did that. (Instead of... you know... curling up in a corner and crying the whole time.)

When things were really shit, I did this. It meant I mostly worked and got very little else done. But the result is that I built a new career out of thin air. One that makes me happy and helped things settle down to the extent that now I don't have to be at panic stations the whole time.

The other interesting thing is that now that things are calming down a bit, I can do one thing much quicker and easier... And then I can do another. And another...

Which means that, after focusing on only doing one thing, I can look back at a day like today and be shocked at how much I actually ended up getting done. It becomes as simple as keeping track of what I've done, and actually doing something instead of fussing about it.

Et voila. My semi-inspirational thought for the day.

How are you doing? What are you busy with at the moment?

IWSG: A Fresh Start

More information here.

After about three months of drama around finding a house, we're finally moving to a new place. In fact, I'm writing this on Monday because I know that I'll be about knee deep into packing, loading, and moving things by the time this post comes live.

Maybe I'm overly optimistic, but it's really feeling like this move will mostly bring to an end five years of chaos that I've had to cope with every day. To that end, I'm really excited to get moving, even if the amount of stuff that needs to be dealt with would have other people pulling out their hair.

But at the same time, this new start also involves a ton of processing of another sort. Emotional. If this move is to be the first day of the rest of my life, I have to cut some stuff out and leave it right here in this house. 

I've been so locked in survival/defense/fight/flight mode that it's become my go to. The thing is... it's exhausting. Except for hopeful, my other single-word emotional status is currently drained. So in a lot of ways, I haven't felt like myself for at least three years... which is also why my fiction-writing productivity took a massive hit. 

I'm not a person hoping for a certain set of perfect circumstances, but when negativity and the accompanying anxiety hits often and at random, making you lose any small amount of momentum you might have gained literally the day before... It's heartbreaking. 

So the fact that I managed to get Book 3 of War of Six Crowns to any stage of completion despite this is something for me to be proud of. 

But despite this and despite my growing success as a full-time writer... I'm feeling a growing sense of discontent. In a sense this is a good thing. I'm actually calm enough and able to not be at panic stations for long enough to allow me time to miss certain things I had left by the way-side to just allow me to get through. 

See, I've been cutting back to the bare minimum so that I could keep going while dragging such a huge amount of drama with me. But now I'm very much to offload the drama right here. Which should really leave a lot of space for other things. And right now, that space feels like a void. A void of writing where I took over two years to finish a rewrite and revision because I hadn't been able to write consecutively for more than two days in a row in over two years. A void of art because I never felt secure enough to actually commit to an art project. 

Here's the thing though, I've been so used to... not... fitting everything in that the thought of moving furniture around in my head is pretty daunting. It feels almost like too much of a challenge to work and write and focus on my health and do more art (other than writing) and read more and resume my French practice so I don't lose it again and be more active on social media and... and... and... 

But the thing is that I just have to find a way. My thinking is to spend maybe the rest of the month evaluating my life and everything I want to do, and then decide how I'm going to start bringing those things in. 

Do you also find it daunting to make things fit into your life? How do you approach it?

Update Day: Gosh I'm Busy

Last Friday of the month means it's time for another update day. In case you're wondering what I'm talking about, a group of us have set some crazy/very important goals. Then on the last Friday of the month, we post updates on our progress. You're welcome to join, if you want. All you have to do is click here for more details.

As you guys might remember from last month, I got a major contract that's really a massive jump forward for me. This was the first full month I did this, and guys... I just really love it. More than that, though, I'm proving myself to be more and more inexpendable by being able to understand economics, write articles, and read French. That last one seems to be especially handy, since the company I'm writing for is active in Africa, which has large francophone portions. As a result, the source documents I have to use in creating my articles are all French, and it looks like no one in the comms department (which is what I'm contracted to) can read it.

At any rate, this job has proven to be basically the only one I've ever done that has my brain firing both hemispheres. So yeah, it's awesome. Also awesome is that it totally does count as using my writing skills, which means that as of this month, I'm just under halfway to my five-year monthly earnings goal.

Overall, though, I can say that my life is the best it's been in... about four years. Although there are some major unresolved issues, it just becomes so much easier to cope when you're making decent money.

But there's a bit of a storm brewing, namely a massive and growing frustration at the fact that I'm not able to work on my own stuff as much as I want. See, when I was beyond stressed out 90% of the time, a lot of my creativity just... vanished. Now I'm unstressing and it wants to play. Don't get me wrong, it's loving the day-job right now. But let's just say my muse is a bit pissed that I'm not making massive progress on my own books.

For this, though, I can't blame the job. I'm just super busy all of a sudden. A lot of new opportunities are opening up for my family so, as the only one who's "accounting literate" (as in able to tell the difference between debits and credits), I have to pitch in a lot and help. On top of this, I'm making a seriously concerted effort to brush up on my French.

One reason for this is the French reports I have to read. The other is that I got sponsored by someone to go to France for ten days in August. (!!!) We're going to a rural area up north, though, and will be living with people who really aren't all that good at English, so I'm doing as much as I can to be conversant in French. I've kept up my vocab for years by reading French, but because I don't have a lot of access to French speakers, I'm seriously rusty on the speaking part. You know... just having the ability to spontaneously convert your thoughts into speech that the other guy understands.

This meant that I had to put even more of an effort into immersing myself, so more reading French, more French TV series (thanks, Netflix!) and just practicing on Duolingo. Oh and narrating almost everything I do to myself in French so I can get used to verbalizing thoughts. Most of this takes up a chunk of time, though.

The French trip also meant that I had to renew my passport (because of course it would expire the one time I really don't have time to renew it), and will mean that I have to get my visum. Sigh.

So all in all, my life is still getting in the way of my writing, but just in a good way. This month, though, I really really want to finish revisions to Book 3. It's been languishing long enough. I'm just going to make that my goal for July.

What about you guys? How are you doing? Any goals achieved, since we're at the halfway mark?

Insecure Writer's Support Group: ........ Already?!

The Insecure Writer's Support Group is a monthly bloghop where writers can share their doubts, fears and insecurities with each other. It's a nice way to vent, but also to realize you're not alone. If you'd like to sign up, click here.

Also, if you'd rather read this post on a Wordpress blog, click here.

You know, you'd think that starting fresh for the New Year would leave me fresh and renewed and at least a little less insecure than usual, but alas... No. 

What's the problem? Oh, it's an old one. I have it frequently...

Namely, the sheer staggering amount of items I have on my to-do list. Except this year is worse. Why? 

Last year, I kept track of my list with a diary and pens, which meant that I had at most 20 tasks on a given day. But I switched to Trello last year, which is the same thing, except digital, which means I can set myself an unlimited amount of tasks. 

And it seems like my life has taken it upon itself to meet that challenge. 

On January 1st, I cleaned up all my lists, starting from scratch with only my goals as a starting point. 

Then I started adding the little tasks I have to do from day to day. And added... and added. 

And in two days, my list of things I need to do today shot up from 0 to 30. Count them. 30 items. 

*Cue maniacal laughter* 

To be fair, I can shift a lot of them out to other days, but for some reason, I'm just not getting to the ones I deem to be essential, like having to spend at least 20 minutes today on editing my book. I literally can't figure out where I'm going to squish that in yet. 

And this is supposed to be a day off. 

Whelp!

How are you doing? Do you also feel like 2018 is starting like an avalanche?

Got Goals? Bloghop Pt 2: My Goals for 2018

This blog post is part of my update for the Got Goals? Bloghop. For those of you who are wondering, a bunch of us have set some crazy or just crazy important goals, and once a month, we post updates on our progress toward those goals. For more information or to join in the fun, click here.

In Part 1, I shared how I did with my 2017 goals, but today, I want to take a look at what I want to achieve in 2018.

I've been struggling to wrap my head around goals this year for some reason. Maybe it's because I feel like I'm hopelessly behind on everything, or maybe it's because everything feels like it's up in the air, which makes planning ahead for a year a bit difficult.

But... I do feel like I get more done if I do have a goal frame-work in my life, so I'm going to try.

Okay. So. My goal is to make a living as a writer (which also includes using my writing and publishing knowledge), but for that to work, I need to sort my life out in general. (Again. *Eye roll.*)

So I'm going to go back to categories this year.

Five-Year Goal: Make a Living Off My Writing

Technically I achieved this last year, but I'm going to keep the goal as is, because I'm still far from the number I want to reach. Also, I do want to change the way in which I'm reaching this goal. 

So, my goals towards my Five-Year Goal are:

1) Earn $2,500 per month by the end of this year.

2) Change the profile of my earnings so a third of my income comes from publishing and/or selling my own work. 

This brings me to the next break down of my goals: 

Writing/Publishing Goals

First, I really need to write more, but I also really need to publish something. I can't keep skipping publishing years. 

1) Write or edit something of my own every day. 

2) Finish and publish Wo6C3.

3) Publish the sequel to Endless and/or

4) Publish my historical romance. 

This brings me to the next heading, since it's no use to publish without marketing: 

Marketing Goals

These are a bit more varied, but somewhat more involved than you'd think. 

1) Update my website. Yes, I have a website, for which I pay hosting, but it's so out of date, like before-I-split-with-my-publisher old, so I never link to it, which I find to be sad. 

2) Create a newsletter. Finally have a big enough readership to justify this. 

3) Update The Vanished Knight, The Heir's Choice and Endless to reflect everything I've learned in the past two years. (Like better formatting, since I'm way more experienced now than I was when I started self-publishing.)

4) Be more active on my social networks. (Which includes figuring a content strategy I can actually stick to.) 

5) Ramp up marketing for Wo6C3 as I prepare to publish it. 

And then I have some more goals regarding my life, since being of sound mind and in good health actually helps me get more done. 

Life Goals

1) Be more healthy. Yeah yeah I know this one always gets up there, but this one is always the first goal to go when the wheels fall off, so I need to sort my shit out here. I only have to lose like 66 pounds or something now. Sigh.

2) Read for at least 15 minutes every day.

3) Rest from computer screens from sunrise to sunset on at least one day a week. 

4) Finish the needlepoint tapestry I started like two years ago.

5) Finish the oil painting I definitely started two years ago.

Okay those are the big ones I can think of right now. I'll probably add and deduct goals as I go, depending on how my year goes, but I feel like I hit all the important things. 

What about you? What goals did you set for 2018? Don't forget to sign up if you want to join the Got Goals? Bloghop. 

Update Day: The End of Year 1

Today is the last Friday of the month, which means it's time for another update on the Got Goals Bloghop. For those of you unfamiliar with Update Day, a bunch of us set some crazy or just plain important goals and update each other on our progress once a month. If you would like more information or to just see who else is taking part, please click here.

PLEASE NOTE IF YOU ARE ALREADY A PARTICIPANT: The site hosting the linky sign-up is down, so please follow the link above to be taken to a blog post where you can leave your update link.

On 4 September, 2016, I had decided to reset my goals and approach writing as a full-time job, where I use my writing knowledge in various ways in order to make a sustainable income.

When I started out, a lot of people thought I was nuts. Heck. Some days, especially in November, I felt I was nuts.

But here I am.

I made it.

So I thought I'd share my thoughts on my progress.

I've been earning minimum wage pretty much consistently this year.

This is both a good and a bad thing. On the good side, the money I earned was enough to keep me and my family going during hard times. 

On the bad, I would have liked to earn more by now. 

The probable reason why I didn't? When I had started out, I had planned to use the money I make to market my books to sell more of them, which would have generated extra income aside from the freelancing I now do. 

But that money basically went into surviving for a large chunk of the year, and otherwise to keep my freelance side of the business afloat. So about 90% of my income is from freelancing, where I would have liked a more even split between my sources of income. And given that those other sources of income would have been passive, meaning I didn't need to do much myself to earn the money, I fell short of where I wanted to be.

That said, the fact that I've been generating pretty much an even income every month means that I should be able to use my freelance work as a spine as I spend next year preparing to publish more books again. 

I finally finished Book 3. 

Ah yes. Book 3. 

Number 1 reason why I didn't publish anything this year: My life went to hell in a handbasket starting around February. 

Number 2 reason: Book 3 itself. The War of Six Crowns is my major focus, writing-wise, so I've basically put all my available time into getting it publishing-ready. The problem is I completely underestimated the sheer size of this project. 

A lot of times this year, Book 3 felt like a bottomless, endless pit and, it wasn't only a case of not being able to finish it on schedule, but also the fact that I literally couldn't work on anything else all year. 

I finished rewriting Book 3 in August, about nine months after I had planned to publish it. Now I'm taking the approach of it's going to take as long as it's going to take, because after putting in this amount of work, I'm really not excited to rush it to market without being happy with the quality. 

Getting something done is like opening a nesting doll. 

Maybe it's because of the way I look at things, but sometimes it feels like everything is connected to everything else. And sometimes, it can be hard to see what needs to be done first. Do I finish writing a book or do I update my website? Do I update my covers and interior or do I set up the newsletter so I can include the newsletter sign-up? Do I spend the morning freelancing so I can get this job out of the way, or do I spend it writing so I can actually make progress on my own work? 

And so on. 

And if I do manage to finish one thing, I take another look and see a thousand more. This often makes it feel like I'm not really making a lot of progress, but as I sit here, looking back, I'm awed. 

And I know that I laid some groundwork for an astounding Year 2. 

How are you doing? Do you have any major goals you're working on?

Update Day: Warning. This Is a Big One.

Hey everyone! Yesterday was the last Friday of the month, which means it was time for another Update Day. Sadly for me, I was forced to miss updating in time because the Internet went down.

For those of you wondering what on Earth I'm talking about, a few of us writers are taking part in a bloghop hosted by me and Jen Garrett, where we set crazy or just seriously important goals, and then post updates on the last Friday of the month.

A lot of stuff has happened though, which has solidified my priorities, so bewarned, this is going to be a long post as I set out and explain my major goals for the next few weeks and months ahead. Ready?

Okay strap in.

So How Did I Do? 

It was a bit of a mixed bag for me, with a lot of fails mixed in with my success. 

The big thing is: 

I finished drafting Book 3! *sparkly confetti*

Everything else... Meh. 

Book 3 got done with about 20k words left to spare, and once I did that, I just couldn't keep the momentum going on another project. Used to be that I could easily switch between projects, but I'm out of practice because Book 3 has basically been taking up all my creative mind space for the past two years. 

So this Camp NaNo, despite me doing awesome for as long as I was writing, is going to be a lose for me. Oh well. 

And as for my social media... I tried to update my blog once a week on Fridays, which I mostly succeeded at, but I skipped last week because I was drained from finishing Book 3. (I did the last chapters in an eight-thousand-word marathon.)

Because of this and a whole lot of other stuff I'll get into in a bit, I also didn't get around to vlogging. I have recorded a video, but didn't edit it because I thought it would be better if my first update in a while was for this post... And then I got busy with this other thing and didn't record the video. 

*Sigh.*

I was active on twitter and I estimate I've gained close to 200 followers between my two accounts, so that's a win. 

Then, I also did two mammoth editing jobs for clients and am now working on a third, AND I've been working on the covers for The War of Six Crowns, the series. And man. The updated cover for The Vanished Knight is gorgeous. I think it might be my best yet, and the concept for the series of covers really has me excited, because it's a major challenges. 

Then I've also managed to do some reading. 

AND! Once I've wrapped up Book 3, I've started kicking my unhealthy lifestyle to the curb. 

Wow. Now that I'm listing everything I've achieved... I've actually had an epic month. 

What Would I Like to Do in the Next Few Months? 

Writing 

Because Book 3 needs to rest, I'm going to work on something else. And some of you guys, who've beta'ed for me in the past, will possibly be glad to know I've decided to do some work on Eden's Son, my Historical Romance. 

I just really need a change of pace from Book 3, and I though it could be nice if I managed to wrap up ES1 and publish it this year, since it's the second oldest story I've written and the oldest of my story concepts. (I've been working on various iterations of this story basically forever. In fact, the first novel I ever started to write is a book in this series, before I realized that there was a lot of story before that book that needed to be told first.) 

Also, at the risk of sounding really cynical, it would be nice if I have a romance out to help stabilize my writing income. But I freaking love this story, so it's going to be a pleasure to get it done after sixteen odd years.

Publishing and Marketing Stuff

There is soooooooooooo much I need to do that I haven't gotten around to before. I just couldn't focus on all this when I had Book 3 staring at me like a baleful child. But now it's done, So I can at least to do the following: 

1) Regular blog and vlog posts.
I at least want to get back to my Monday/Friday schedule, with Friday featuring a vlog post of some sort. For that, I'm probably going to start filming a whole lot of videos on writing topics that I can edit as needed so I have a bit more of a buffer for when I'm busy, and then I'm going to do my more personal vlog updates on the fly when I have the opportunity. I want my Monday blog posts to relate to my Friday posts in some way, so that's also going to help me get some content done in time. Although I love being all nice and personal, I also realize that adding value is something I haven't been able to do for years, so I need to fix that. 

2) Continue with my graphic design self-study. 
Believe it or not, I've gone from designing my own covers because it's cheaper to designing my own covers because I love them more than I do when someone else designs for me. So to save myself the pain and tears of having to learn things the hard way, I'm doing a graphic design course so I can get a better concept of what's going on and how to achieve what I want to achieve with my covers. 

I'm a terrible boss to myself. My whole feeling is that if I'm going to self publish, all aspects of the production of my book needs to be better than what anyone else would have done for me. That means I'm learning some mad skills. Helps that my freelancing activities are basically paying me to learn stuff. 

3) Update my website. 
This is another thing where my graphic design is going to come in handy. My old author website is so out of date that I don't even point people at it anymore. So that needs to be fixed. Before that can happen, though: 

4) Update the cover to The Heir's Choice. 
I need to implement the ideas I have brewing for that cover and as a bonus, do a few fixes on the cover to Endless while I'm at it. Once those are done, I can get into building the new site. (Which is another skill I'm having to learn. Insane, but makes sense given my other job... More on this later.) 

5) Set-up a newsletter (or three) with a signup page on my website. 
I've resisted the newsletter thing for a while because I didn't believe I had enough people interested in reading a newsletter. Thanks to Wattpad, this has now changed. The Vanished Knight now has close to 250k reads and a whole lot of people who keep contacting me for updates on Book 3. 

6) Update the front and back-matter of my books to point to the website and newsletter. 
And while I'm at it, I'm just going to reformat the whole shebang. I've learned a boatload of new stuff since self-publishing the first time. So I'm taking the books up to the next level. 

CEO Duties

You didn't read that wrong. For the first time since I've finished my degree and started working for the family business, my mom's let me be the boss. 

I think I mentioned that we were working on another business thing where we had some investors interested in the project... Well... that concept underlying the business was my idea, so my mom and I agreed that I need to be in charge of it, although she's the MD, which means she's going to be the one to do the actual day-to-day running of the business once it's up. 

But basically, where we are requires a prototype of a site to be built for coders and also potential investors. And since this is a monster project and I hate people telling me "can't do it," we're going to build the first prototype ourselves to help outsiders see what we're envisaging. 

Which is, again, where learning some site-building skills will come in. Fun fact, the site has so many working parts that I'm probably going to be able to build a seriously ambitious author site...as practice. 

Freelancing

Depending on how much time I'm going to spend on the monster site, this is probably going to be the thing that gets a down-grade on my priority list. I'm going to try and not down-scale my freelancing in favor of my site because I still want to be a full-time writer (and the owner of a monster site.) 

But. It it's going to come down to a choice between my writing/publishing, the site, and the freelancing, I think you can see why the freelancing will be the first to give. 

Hopefully, though, I'll be able to get everything done. And the amazing amount of stuff I pulled off in July without feeling on the verge of collapse gives me hope. 

My Health 

Here's something I haven't really brought up in a while. Mostly because it's embarrassing, how bad I am at taking care of myself. 

Why? Because I know how bad certain foods are to me. I know how important it is, especially to me, not to just sit on my butt day-in and day-out. I know that eating healthily and exercising actually give me the energy I need to tackle major projects without getting drained. I know that sixteen-hour work days invariably come back to bite me in the butt at some point. In some really ugly ways. Especially when I'm not eating healthily or exercising.

But did that have any impact at all on my refined sugar intake, exercise habits, water consumption or work hours? 

Not.

One.

Jot. 

But when I finished up Book 3, I felt like I could rule the world, and then just kinda thought I could start by not screwing myself in the long run. I'd like to actually have a functional body when I'm old, so this is actually a bit of a priority.

1) Diet

No, I don't mean this in the "starve-myself and get trim" kind of way. I'm talking about changing my diet permanently. Which means no refined carbs and sugars. I know a lot of people have a fit every time I mention not consuming carbs as a major part of my diet. But you know what? The only time I really feel normal, when I'm not feeling like I'm going to crash, or get a massive headache any moment now, or just feel like I don't have the strength to do something, or even, for that matter, that I'm constantly hungry, even when I'm getting up from the table, is when I'm on a high-fat, low-carb diet. So that's what I'm doing. 

I'm not completely giving up carbs. I'm just getting mine in by consuming vegetables, fruit and honey instead of starch. 

2) Weight

Yeah yeah, I'm beautiful as I am. Really I am. This isn't a self-confidence thing as I was blessed with an ability to tie my confidence to issues other than my body. 

But. 

Being at the heaviest weight I've ever been at the age of 28 is not good for my back, which is something I have injured in the past. (More on this in a bit.) Also, my family has a history of heart disease and diabetes, both of which are tied to unhealthy diets and obesity. And yes. I'm blessed with a body that evenly distributes fat when I gain weight, but I am, in fact obese. 

So to save myself a lot of heartache and pain now, I'm going to get the weight down and keep it down. And so you know, I had just short of 40 kg (88 lb) to lose when I started on Sunday. So far this week, I'm 2.5 kg (5 lb 8 oz) down. 

3) Water

People always get told that they need 2 liters (half a gallon) of water a day, but did you know your requirement is actually determined by your weight? The heavier you are, the more water you require. 

So when I decided to track my weight and fix my diet, I also got myself an app to track my intake and remind myself to drink water. This might seem extreme, but I tend to forget to drink water when I write. So now I don't. 

And just so you know, the goal for my current weight is 3.5 liters (7.4 liquid pints) per day. And if you think that's impossible to do. It's not.

4) Exercise

As I mentioned before, I have injured my back in the past, so being overweight really doesn't help. And the whole reason I got injured in the first place was because my core was weak. And all I've done in the years since is let my core weaken further. 

No more. 

I've signed up for an app called 30 Day Challenge. It has a variety of exercise challenges based on what you want to focus on and how fit you are. The exercises are really intensive, mostly body-weight-resistance exercises, which means that the five-minute sessions I'm currently on are really making a huge difference to my body. 

One wouldn't think that five minutes would help, but my core has gone from being able to support me for at most five seconds of plank to thirty seconds of plank in a week. And if you don't think that's impressive, I don't think you've done the plank before.

The exercises never give me that "no-pain-no-gain" feeling, because they seem to be designed to be *just* enough to challenge the participant without demoralizing them. But every single day is just a little bit more challenging than the day before. And I assume that eventually, almost without noticing, I'll be in a place where I'll be able to do hours of exercise if I want without actually finding it to be daunting or impossible. (Which I do now.) 

This is mostly weight training, though, so I've started dancing again to get some cardio in. This week, I went to my first ever line dancing class, but I have a huge hankering for ballroom again too, so I might take that as well. 

5) My lifestyle in general. 
Other than the eating, water drinking and exercise, I also really need to sort out a few other things. Firstly, my sleeping patterns. Because of my insane (and I don't mean this as a self-compliment) work-ethic, I often work until 3 a.m. in the morning and start my day between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. I take almost no breaks from my computer once I sit down. 

So. I have to institute a stricter work-hour rule, where I don't pass a certain time, and where I then have to at least do something to rest in the evening. This can be reading or even some sort of craft. Or the dancing classes. 

Point is, I know I'm going to burn out if I continue keeping the hours I'm keeping, so I'm going to adapt now before I'm forced to by my own exhaustion. 

Balance is the thing I'm going for here, so I'm going to literally schedule in time to rest because otherwise I'm just going to forget. (Same way I forget to drink water.) 

Whoa that's a lot, so I'm going to stop here for now. But how did you do? Anyone feel like joining me on the 30 Day Challenge? 

Ever had one of those days?

You might have picked up that I'm starting to be more active on my social networks, including this blog. And the thing is that I've been wanting to get back to my usual MWF posting schedule again.

But man.

Today is just crap.

Have you ever felt like someone put your life on slow mo while time just marches on?

That's what my day was like today.

It seemed simple enough.

Wake up. Wash the floors. Move the horses. Write a vlog post. Write today's blog post. Record vlog post. Move horses back. Edit vlog post.

How did it go?

Woke up.

Wash floor, only to be told we have to move the horses now and oops! We and all the dogs are over the wet tiles.

Move the horses. Takes longer than usual.

Return to floor. Wash it a second time.

Brother and dogs walk over the floor again. So I hand him the mop.

Sit down to write vlog post. Get called to early lunch.

Sit down to write vlog post. Remember admin stuff I have to help my brother/assistant with.

Sit down to write vlog post.

It's time to move the horses back. But this time, they have to put on blankets, which they DO NOT LIKE. This takes two hours.

Return to record vlog post. 1) It's dinner time and 2) Battery's dead.

Charge battery.

Record video. Keep forgetting what I want to say, making me take twice as long to record because I keep having to check the script.

Download video.

"Open" video editing software. The program and the others in its suite need to update before I can open and use it.

It's 10 p.m.

*headdesk*

But at the same time... I have so much to be grateful for.

How is/was your day? 

Keep Calm and Chill Out: 4 Reasons Why Pushing Through Exhaustion Is a Bad Idea

My vlog post from last week has gotten me thinking a lot about why I almost always have to get to the point of burning out before I feel “okay” with taking a break.

In a lot of ways, I think it comes down to this whole mentality of Keep Calm and Carry On.

Don’t get me wrong. Yes, carrying on despite adversity is often the best thing we can do. But sometimes, I think we’re carrying on a little bit too far. And this is why:

1) Forcing ourselves to keep going despite exhaustion only exhausts us more. 

Yeah yeah I know. Thank you, Captain Obvious. Obviously doing things when you’re already tired makes the tiredness worse. It’s common sense.

And yet, we ignore this common sense all the time.

What’s more, people expect it from us. They even praise use for doing it. Think I’m crazy? Take a look around at people who are positively bragging about the fact that they’re living off of coffee and pulling all-nighter after all-nighter. And then see the comments. Only a few “buzzkills” will think to say, “Five nights in a row already? This is really bad for you. Please go get some sleep.”

And sometimes, that’s fine. We often do need to push through exhaustion, because we quite simply are exhausted all the time. So if we don’t push ourselves, we wouldn’t get anywhere.

But as with my five-all-nighters-in-a-row example, there are limits, and we’re all but ignoring them all the time.

2) There’s so much more to exhaustion than being tired. 

So let me tell you a little story. I committed to writing because it was my lifeline after I had proverbially drowned myself in a study course I’d hated.

I knew in the first week of my studies (in 2007) that I wasn’t enjoying the course, but the Keep Calm and Carry On thing struck again. And I carried on. And on. Often giving up my sleep—all-nighters for the win, right? The faculty acted as if this wasn’t only normal, but to be expected as a prerequisite for success.

Half way through 2008, I seriously considered throwing myself in front of a car to be a valid alternative to going to class.

It wasn’t even that I was suicidal. I don’t think. But I was exhausted. Mentally. Physically. Emotionally. And by ignoring my exhaustion for about 18 months, I had lost the capacity for normal emotions about a class. I had lost most of the capacity to think straight. I say “most,” because in the moment I was about to take that step, something in my mind went “WTF ARE YOU DOING?????!!!!!!!” and I had a moment of clarity.

I crossed the street and skipped class. Instead I went to administration and changed my degree.

But here’s the thing. The damage was done.

3) Medium term exhaustion leads to long term damage. 

So I had taken myself out of the nightmare degree and made sure to get more sleep. Did that make me feel better?

No more than quitting smoking after being diagnosed cures lung cancer.

My mom not-so-secretly thought I was taking drugs because, simply put, I was broken more than a year after leaving that degree.

I literally can’t remember the second semester of my second year (2008). I know I passed most of my subjects, but the one I failed... It’s like a hole in my brain. I can’t even remember sitting for the exam.

I had issues at fencing practice in 2009. Why? Because parrying and self-defense is important if you want to win. And my self-preservation instincts had been all but destroyed. I could literally see the hits coming in, but my brain just wouldn’t react defensively.

My short term memory was blown.

And worse, I, a trivia queen, couldn’t recall whole chunks of the knowledge I’ve gathered over my entire life.

In the end, the only thing that stopped me from being clinically diagnosed with depression in 2010 (I think. Kinda hazy on the date there.) was the fact that I had 3D awareness in the psychologist’s test.

Everything else was blown to hell, as a direct result of my exhaustion.

I knew something was wrong, but didn’t realize how bad it was until the psychologist gave me a four digit phrase that I couldn’t repeat back five seconds after I’d heard it.

When did I start to feel normal? 2013.

As in a whole five years after I had quit exhausting myself. 18 months of damage, five years of recovery.

4) Exhaustion is like boiling a frog.

Yeah, I know quite a few of you might be thinking Oh this would never be as bad for me. I’m in total control. 

The thing is, pushing yourself through exhaustion isn’t a once-off. It’s cumulative. You know the analogy of boiling frogs, right?

Toss a frog into boiling water and it jumps out. Put it in cold water and then put it to boil.

It’s the same thing with exhaustion. Every time we push through, we’re tiring ourselves out just a little bit more.

And you might be thinking Huh. This isn’t that bad. But that’s just you acclimating yourself to your new normal of exhaustion.

If there isn’t a finite, certain end to the causes of your exhaustion, your new normal might end up being the complete destruction of your health and mind.

So when it’s looking like the crap that’s exhausting you just isn’t ending, the logical reaction isn’t to carry on.

It’s to pace yourself. To take a step back and pare back to the absolute minimum so that you can get to the end with most of yourself intact. Life is hard enough as a marathon, without you doing repeated 100m sprints as you go.

What about you? Do you have a tendency to push yourself too far? How do you deal with exhaustion? 

The Importance of Stepping Back

Hey lovely people! My vlog post ended up coming a week late, because I caught the flu. Sigh. Really complicated everything. It's finally done, though, so I hope you enjoy it. :-)

Going off of the comments I got last time, I decided to keep posting my script below the video for those of you who prefer to read.

And if you're not a Blogger user who somehow got to this blog, you can find this same post on Wordpress here.


I want to talk about a really understated bit of advice that can be vital to your survival as a writer. Namely: That sometimes, you just need to step back, take your foot off the gas pedal.

As you might know from my more recent vlog updates, things haven’t been going well with me lately. Basically, nothing has been quite going my way since 2014, but that was okay, because I was taught that old truism that we all get fed with mother’s milk:

If you work hard, everything will work out. 

Eh…

Turns out not so much.

See, in the years since 2014, I’d worked 16 hour days, often more in order to do more, and I’d do that until I was on the edge of breaking emotionally. I never stopped writing. Never stopped building at businesses and marketing and literally anything that I *knew* would get me ahead.

And it just kept feeling like everything was turning to dust under my feet.

The worst part? None of the hours I’d spent, of the health I’d risked, of the life I’d postponed… none of it actually meant anything.

Because there are always assholes out to get you. And they will steal your life and your hours of work and your very soul if they can, just to benefit themselves.

So yeah. After relentlessly pushing myself for almost four years, there came a point where I just…couldn’t. Not going to go into detail, but I came to the point where I was so exhausted that I couldn’t fight anymore.

I couldn’t keep acting like everything was okay and that it was business as usual, because it wasn’t.

And so, I pulled back. From as much as I could. Obviously there are some commitments you can’t avoid without incurring long-term damage, but if there was something I could leave with a cost I could tolerate, I did it.

This sadly included my writing, because the stresses of my life had basically drained my creativity. So instead of forcing myself to write, I forced myself not to. Instead, I spent my writing hours doing needlepoint or crocheting. Anything with an almost mindless, repetitive motion.

What this did was it allowed me to grieve. It allowed me to feel. It let me process my pain and frustration instead of allowing me to suppress them like I’d been doing for years. It put me in a place where I could regain some perspective. Where I could look at the problems and at least get to the point where I could see the value in the things I was doing again.

And that’s probably the most important thing about stepping back. When we’re writers, we basically take on an extra job, and when we’re published, marketing that book becomes another job. Which means that it’s go go go go all the time with no stopping, and when things aren’t going as well as they should, it’s so easy to be overwhelmed. It’s too easy to lose the meaning of what we’re doing in the mad rush to get it all done.

So it becomes imperative that we step back and breathe at least for a few days, just to regain a sense of balance before taking everything on again.

What do you do to recharge when you're pulling back? 

Update Day, May 2017

Hey all! I decided I'm going to try something different today. As you know, I have been vlogging for a while, but I also realized that not everyone can watch the video whenever they visit my blog. 

So today, I decided to put the video up top, and then follow it with the script from which the video is based. Please let me know what you think of this format!


Gosh, I can’t believe how much time has been flying by lately. It seemed like a few days ago that I last posted a vlog update, so I was quite shocked to see that it was three months ago. But there you go. Sometimes life and time get in the way, and the next thing you know, it’s the end of May. Ugh. Untentional rhyme.

But because we’re now on the last Friday of May, it’s time for me to share an update for my GotGoals bloghop. In case you’re wondering what the hell I’m talking about…

I’m co-hosting a bloghop with Jen and Brittney, where we set some crazy, big or just really important writerly goals. Then on the last Friday of the month, we post updates on the progress we’ve made.

I also find it useful to set smaller monthly goals, which I then use as stepping stones toward my bigger goals.

So how did I do? 

Well, for the fact that I somehow completely let time get away from me this month, surprisingly well. Okay so I have to say that I didn’t set the bar particularly high, because I was trying to find my feet after quite a lot of crap. But I did say I wanted to write an average of five minutes per day.

And you know what? I hit that average on day two. It’s funny how averages work that way.

That said, the one thing that did take a hit this month was my freelancing. I’ve basically been endlessly working on some job or the other for the past three months, then got a big job at the end of last month and then… crickets. The frustrating thing is that I got that job and it was supposed to take two weeks, but my client hit a snag with the content I’m supposed to format. It’s really not her fault or anything like that, but the net effect is that I’m stuck waiting for her to get back to me. I know eventually that’ll get done, though, so it’s nice to know the money is still hanging around somewhere, waiting for me.

Then I went from nothing to having three jobs to do, but they all only came in over this past weekend, so I will only be able to record the income in June.

So things are really not going badly, but the sudden three week silence really got to me, because I’ve let everything else fall by the way-side over the past few months. It’s really annoying when I wish I could say I spent my empty days writing, but no, they were all spent catching up on a huge admin backlog.

I just realized that if I want to make any progress to the next level, and… you know, actually have more than five minutes a day to write, I need to get some help in. Luckily for me, I have an awesome brother who wants some flexible part time hours while he studies, et voila. I now have an assistant who’s going to help me keep everything rolling on schedule.

Which means that I’ll be able to regularly update as well. Eh…hopefully.

So with that in mind, next month’s goals: 

1) Write an average of 10 minutes every day.
2) Earn $1000 of writing or publishing related income.
3) Weekly updates to my vlog.
4) Sort out the snarling mess that is my social networks as a whole.

That’s it from me for this month. Please do leave me a comment about today's post structure. And how did your month go? Got any crazy writing goals that you’re chasing down? If you'd like to join the bloghop, you can find more information here. 

Putting Your Memories into the Story by Yolanda Renée

Hey everyone! Today I want to welcome Yolanda Renée to the Five Year Project as part of her blog tour for her new book, The Snowman. Take it away, Yolanda!

Putting Your Memories into the Story

Write what you know, we’ve all been told to do this, and I do it consistently. No, I don’t know anything about killing a person, or catching the culprit, at least personally, but I have studied and researched the topic. However, I do know a little about Alaska since I’ve lived there, and thanks to Google maps I can explore new and interesting places that I haven’t visited. I described 4th Avenue, written as Fourth Avenue, in my story because I could see it from my bedroom window when I lived in Anchorage, and yes it held some very risqué establishments. I’ve also purchased Alaskan Pottery that’s featured in the Reincarnation Chapter. I’ve visited several of the parks, Stowy’s favorite body dumping sites, such as Earthquake Park, a park created after the 1964, 9.4 earthquake that caused a residential neighborhood to slid into the ocean.

One of my first introduction to the state was the immense size of the bears that greet you as you walk through the Anchorage airport. Polar Bears, Kodiak’s, and grizzlies all skillfully preserved by taxidermists, (Stowy’s chosen hobby) all very intimidating.

I do that with all my stories, put a little of my memories into the mix, even statements once made to me by unsuspecting friends, or co-workers. Like when I first told folks that I was visiting Alaska during vacation. “Why would you want to visit that forsaken iceberg?” A former boss asked. I couldn’t believe his ignorance about our 49th state, but I never forgot his statement and allowed Fern Jenkins to use it when describing where she’d rather spend Thanksgiving.

“Don’t be foolish. Home is where Thanksgiving happens. Here. Not some forsaken iceberg.”

Another interesting side note might be the story as to how Stowy Jenkins got his name, Stone. I took that from a story my father told me about his father. How he’d taken my dad out to learn how to swim in an old coal mining quarry and threw him in. It was sink or swim! He swam, of course, but Stowy claims to have sunk like a rock – hence his nickname, Stone. This is a family story that I allowed Stowy to appropriate. He needed a good lie, and I’m sure way back when, that learning to swim in West Virginia happened this way more than once. Yes, my family is originally from West Virginia, and the name Stowy, is a family name. Another of my writing habits, using family names. . .

Writing what you know isn’t that difficult and I think it makes fiction writing all the more real! What do you think? Do you use your life in your stories? Please share a story or two in the comments.

Thanks, Misha, for hosting The Snowman Tour!

About Yolanda Renée

At one time Alaska called to me, and I answered. I learned to sleep under the midnight sun, survive in below zero temperatures, and hike the Mountain Ranges. I've traveled from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez, and the memories are some of my most valued. The wonders, mysteries and incredible beauty that is Alaska has never left me and thus now influence my writing.

Despite my adventurous spirit, I achieved my educational goals, married, and I have two handsome sons. Writing is now my focus, my newest adventure!

You can connect with me here:

Blog    *     Facebook     *     Twitter     *     Pinterest     *     Email

It takes a true artist to pursue his victims in the art of seduction, and Stowy Jenkins is no exception, especially with blood as his medium.

Stowy Jenkins, aka, Stone, and as Alaskans refer to him, the Snowman, is a true artist. His muse, Gigi, is the ultimate inspiration for his painting. Her rejection inspires him to use a very unusual medium…blood.

While art may be his passion, the taste for blood is his obsession, and multiple murders, the result.

Rookie, Detective Steven Quaid, is no fan of the Snowman’s murderous exhibitions. A twisted and deadly relationship bond the two men and neither knows who will come out of it alive.

Buy on Amazon

Thanks for visiting, Yolanda! It's always nice to have you stop by. :-) 

What about you, awesome readers? Do you include your memories in your writing?

Update Day: DOH!

Sigh.

It's finally happened. After three years, I finally managed to forget my own bloghop. >_<

I remembered on Thursday and then yesterday, I had to clean out the garage (it was a public holiday in South Africa) and I was so exhausted by the end of it (huge garage... looooooooooots of stuff) that I completely forgot about literally everything I was supposed to do.

Sorry!

But I have to at least give a bit of an update, so here's my Update Day post anyhow. For those of you wondering what all this is about, a bunch of us have set some huge or just super important goals. On the last Friday of every month, we post updates on how we're doing. The accountability and encouragement just does wonders.

You're more than welcome to sign up. All you have to do is click here.

Last month, I decided to be a bit more kind to myself than I was lately, so I haven't really set much in the way of writing and money goals. 

It's just hard to chase down goals (impossible, even) if you're barely able to keep going because it feels like you're drowning. 

To give you an idea of where I was this past month, you can check out my previous post. It wasn't pretty. 

But then you guys reminded me that sometimes, it's just necessary to step back. So I decided to go quiet. To stop pushing and prodding myself. 

I picked up my needlework again because the repetition of stitch after stitch just soothes me. And good thing, because there's about 250,000 stitches to my current project.

And slowly, without me really realizing it, I started to feel better. 

So for this month, I'm going to see if I can maintain what I've been managing lately, plus a few minutes of writing every day. Let's say five minutes.

Just a simple addition, to see if I can ease myself in as simply and as painfully as possible. 

How are you doing?  

Paralysis

I want to write a blog post today, because I know it's good for me. The thing is, I'm struggling. Maybe I'm burned out, but it feels like my words have become a hopelessly tangled heap of strings, and every string I pull brings out a whole host of strings I didn't want to see.

So I guess the words are there (which is new for me.) It's just that there are too many of them. Too many emotions. But hey, it's April so it's unlikely that a lot of you will read this post anyway. So I get to just air some words and see what comes out. 

The truth is, I feel stuck. I've mentioned that my life by and large sucks at the moment, which is fair enough, but until recently, I've always had writing to give me a sense of movement. As long as I made progress on my work in progress, that was okay, because then I was actually working toward something. 

But that also meant that I have been flirting on the edge of burning out for a long time. And by a long time, I mean basically from March 2014. Maybe even earlier. 

The thing is, that thing I mentioned before with my family member who spectacularly fucked us over... It gave me a good old shove into the abyss, and now I'm here with no idea about how to get out. 

And if I'm honest, I might actually be self-sabotaging. 

See in the aftermath, I tried to sit down and write, because I know it's good for me. Because I need to feel like at least something is moving in the wrong direction and.... Nothing. Like... even the notes I'd left for myself to guide me toward the end of the story feel like some other parson wrote them. When I think about writing right now, I just feel... numb. 

And I hate it. So instead of writing, I spent the most of the past month doing nothing. It's not that I'm lazy per se. I'm still working, editing for people, formatting for people...that sort of thing. But when it comes to doing something for myself, something that could actually get me climbing out of the abyss again, I basically stare at the ladder out and do nothing. 

Maybe I've been knocked down one time too many. And although things are starting to go a bit better, I don't feel better. I feel like life is right there, dancing around and waiting for me to get onto my feet so it can hit me in the face again. And honestly, I don't see the attraction of it. 

Three years. 

Three whole fucking years of this shit. 

Two weeks ago was the third anniversary of getting my rights back from Etopia Press. So yes, it's almost exactly three years since everything went to hell, because the crap with Etopia was the start. And man, I fought. I fought like a lion. Things went bad and I wrote more. 

But here I am now, and I don't know if I have anything left. Because everything I do feels like I'm just setting myself up for more harm. 

So I do nothing. 

I stare without blinking and fill my hours with nonsense. Not reaching for the ladder out of the abyss because I don't want to face whatever is waiting for me up there. 

Because that's one thing I can say about being down here. If I don't think about it too much, the paralysis is at least peaceful.

Getting Back to Basics

I briefly considered writing this post for my other blog (you know, the one that actually is supposed to contain musings about my life), but I put that one on hiatus more than a year ago, and I feel bad to take it off hiatus for what could potentially be only one post.

So here we are.

I've been really quiet. Mostly I just needed a break. The events of the past two weeks just really brought me to a brink I didn't like being on. A kind of mute terror that nothing would ever be okay again.

And no, I'm not being dramatic.

One day, I might actually write about this time here, but if you'd like to know exactly what's going on, I have a post about it on my Patreon feed, which you can get to (as well as some awesome rewards) for a $1 subscription pledge. Eek. That looks like a plug. It's really not. I don't like keeping secrets from you guys, but what's going on right now is so ugly that I can't just post it out in public. Patreon is a balance of both, offering easy access to those who really want to know while keeping it relatively private so it can't just come up whenever someone searches my name.

For those of you who'd rather like to skip to the current point I'm making: The shit situation continues, but I'm picking myself up (again) and dusting myself off (again) and getting on with getting on (again.)

Sometimes, it's really hard, almost impossible to do that. Especially when I've been knocked down and back so many times that I'm about a hair's breadth away from losing all faith in humanity. Because the most frustrating thing about all this is that I didn't put myself here. 

But I have to get out somehow and I can't do that if I keep wallowing in the rage I feel toward the growing list of people who've wronged me and those I love. I can't get out if I don't have hope that one day, something I or someone in my family did will pan out. I also can't do it if I'm snowing myself under with a laundry list of expectations when some days, just the act of getting up for the day feels like a chore.

So now I'm going back to basics. If I feel like I'm too burned out to write, I don't write. I've scrapped my publishing deadline for Book 3 because it's already too close and I really don't need the extra pressure. I'm putting in more time with my freelance work which, while still not quite in the "it's taken off" category, still is doing well enough to give me hope that it will take off in the near future. I'm cutting out as much negativity as I can.

This means willing myself not to dwell on the past, and particularly not this most recent thing. I let myself feel them, but then I remind myself I have to move on and do that instead. But also, I've found that the Trump election has turned a lot of people in my social networks (on all sides of the political divide) into toxic people to have contact with.

So I'm culling them out of my feed.

It's nothing personal, but for the sake of my own well-being, I'm doing what I must in order to keep myself in as good an emotional shape as I can.

Because I can still move for as long as I can function on some level.

And if being ruthless with my culling and stingy with my time is what it takes to just get anything done, so be it.

It's already helped too. Because here I am, writing when on IWSG day I could barely even type out a sentence without crying.

There is hope. There is progress.

Onward.

How about you? How do you deal when life gets really difficult? 

Holy Crap I Forgot It's IWSG

I wish I was kidding, but sadly, I'm not. The first of the month always catches me for some reason, because my brain seems to believe that the first Wednesday for the month must be the third or later. *facepalm*

No idea what I'm talking about?

The Insecure Writer's Support Group is a monthly bloghop taking place on the first Wednesday of every month. About two hundred writers are part of the IWSG, sharing our doubt, fears, insecurities and encouragement to let everyone else know that actually, they're not all that alone after all.

You're more than welcome to join, if you'd like. Click here for more information or to sign up.

So. 

Because I already eloquently explained myself last week by vlog, I'm going to re-post here. I did try to keep a brave face on everything, but by the end of the first third or so, I'm basically going into where I really am in my life at the moment. 

Spoiler alert, it's not pretty. (Also, this isn't family rated. Just so you know. And yes, the f-bombs I dropped actually did make me feel better. My mom always asks me that. No idea why.)

Since I'm just going to let that do the talking for me instead of writing again (because I've *just* managed to not burst into tears at the thought and writing about it again would open the scab, so to speak), I figured I'd answer this month's question for those of you who'd rather not see/hear me.

Have you ever pulled out a really old story and reworked it? Did it work out?

Yes, I have. A long long time ago, I finished a rewrite to a book shortly after I finished rewriting Doorways. For those of you who weren't visiting my blog at that time, The Vanished Knight + The Heir's Choice = Doorways. 

It wrote like a dream. I backed up. 

I was backing up the file for the last time when something (and don't ask me what) went wrong. The entire file disappeared, replaced with an empty one of the same name. 

I was heartbroken. So much so that I decided to just shelf the whole project until I could look at it without mourning the project I'd had. 

It took about five years before I decided to look at that thing again, and by then, I'd grown so much as a writer that I ended up redrafting the whole thing from scratch, keeping only the characters and about half of the concept. 

Any you know what? I love it even more than I loved it before. I've started editing it and working on it with critique partners and they've enjoyed it too. 

But... it's still a to be continued when it comes to knowing if it worked out. It's not shelved per se, but because of my lack of time and the abundance of crap in my life as is mentioned in the vlog above, I just haven't been able to get to it when I'm supposed to be finishing the sequel to The Heir's Choice. But one day... Hopefully in this year... 

What about you? Did you ever rework an old story? Any good news to share? Really in need of some good news. 

One update I should mention: the business plan is in with the possible investor, so prayers would be appreciated. 

Got a new vlog post up...

Hey everyone! I'm still getting used to the whole vlogging thing, and since I'm still new on YouTube, I thought I'd do more of an about-me kind of post.

So I shared a bit of information about me, my writing, as well as what I'm planning to read soon.

Enjoy!



What are you reading at the moment?

Balancing

I'm stealing a few moments to check in. It's really busy here on my side, since I'm trying to write 100k words this month and I got three editing and formatting jobs to do.

Not sure what I'm doing right to get all those jobs, but I'm not going to argue with it. I have to say, I'm really glad that I decided to augment my publishing income this way, because I'm actually enjoying it a lot. More than that, spending most of my working hours on this means that I'm really getting paid (and incentivized) to sharpen skills that I can use on my own publishing efforts later.

My major thing this week is to get these jobs done by Friday, because then I have enough money to pay out my Payoneer account, which means my cash flows at least until next month again. Yeah yeah. I know. Business. Bleh.

I realize the need for balance, though. I can't keep writing so much that I don't actually check in on my social networks. (I know. I'm TERRIBLE.) I can't freelance so much that I can't actually write. There has to be a way to make everything fit in.

So now I'm giving myself regular breaks on editing gigs. Usually, I have a tendency to sit down and power through the entire manuscripts in as close to one sitting as possible. I just get lost in what I'm doing, so I don't realize that I haven't moved in four straight hours.

Which is a terrible thing. Very bad for my health. So.

Now I have a timer running. I set it for 30 minutes to an hour, and stop, move around, blog, check in on twitter etc for a short while before starting again.

That way, I also get to refresh my mind, which I imagine will only serve me even better for getting frequent rests than it does without them.

I'm also hoping that giving myself frequent short breaks will keep me from being too tired once I get around to writing. I don't like pushing through exhaustion too much. It's too risky, because if I burn out, it'll be months before I can write, and I've given myself an official(ish) deadline for Book 3.

Luckily for me, writing is feeling like fun at the moment, which means my brain isn't picking up that it's actually a hell of a lot of work. Unless I'm tired.

So it's much better not to tire myself out. I'm way more productive that way.

How are you doing? Any tips for me to stay balanced?

So... looks like this is happening...

Well. I've been wanting to put my social networking stuff into a regular schedule, starting on 1 January and keeping to it as consistently as possible.

I lasted until 5 January.

Terrible, I know.

I have a really good excuse, though.

I've started working on Book 3 of The War of Six Crowns again, and boy did I hit my stride. I even wrote a whopping 10k words on January 5th. Which means for the first time in my life, I really feel like I can make and cross 100k words in one month. (Less, actually, given that I've only started writing on the 5th.)

Crazy, I know, but I really want to see if I can do it. Preferably without burning out.

My strategy was to write as much as I could for the past few days, and see if I could catch up to par for 50k (since I started late.)

It went so well that I'm on par for 75k words. In fact, I'm a day ahead. Which means I only need 6k words to get on par for 100k.

After that, it's 5k a day. Which I might actually make quite easily, given how the words just keep coming at the moment.

That said, I don't want to crash either.

So I'm going to write today's 6k words in 30 minute sprints, followed by 15 minute rest periods, to see how that goes.

Hopefully it works out. Cause it'll be awesome to have Book 3 done.

How are you doing? Anyone want to sprint with me? I'm using #100kchase on Twitter to call my sprints, if you want to keep me company.