Hey everybody!
It’s been a while. There are a lot of reasons, but honestly, i’m not really in the mood to justify my absence. Just know that it was necessary.
I hesitate to start this, as I do with most things that I know I need to do. But part of it is simply that I’m unsure of what sort of content I want to put where. As I write, however, I feel myself formulating, and that’s also often how I work. Sometimes I don’t know the answer to a question until I’ve written it down.
You may have noticed because you’re part of the YouTube gang that I’ve been far more active. That too has been tentative. However, the progress that I’ve made there and in my writing has given me a little bit of hope that maybe I’ve made a mental shift surrounding what I can do around all the other things in my life.
For context, I’m a mom of four, I work full time, I and three of my kids have a genetic disorder that some receive treatment for, and I’m a full time student. There’s a lot going on over here! On top of all that, I’d love to be a full time hybrid author someday. That’s kind of a big thing for me to say because I tend to downplay the things that I desperately want to do for the sake of other people’s desires or the necessities that tend to be far more important.
Even talking to my husband, who I’m more open an honest with than anybody, I do it. I downplay what I want because I’m afraid to hope and I tend to think it’s impossible.
But that’s where the shift has come in. It’s not about what’s holding me back. I think it’s a copout to say that I’m what’s holding me back, and it also tends to remove responsibility from external factors. So, I guess I’m not the only thing that’s holding me back, but there are things that I can do to move myself forward again.
The shift was in deciding that regardless of what happened on the outside, I was going to carve out time for what I love. This meant several things for me.
I had to get my routine a little more solid. I work a boring job, which gives me a lot of time to do other things, but because of the schedule, I was literally always tired. For months, I didn’t get more than a few hours of sleep at a time. I discovered that I thrive on routine, even though it’s difficult for me to keep one up by myself, and having a job schedule that is more consistent is really important for me to feel stable enough to be creative. That stability has been great for my mental health and my writing game and my family life.
I had to have some form of external pressure to get myself up and going. That meant to start up YouTube again. While I don’t think it’s necessary to have a YouTube channel for writing purposes, I noticed a distinct trend in my productivity levels when I’m active on the channel versus when I’m not. I did realize, however, that it doesn’t have much to do with tracking or having people behind the screen to judge me, as it does with finding a way to document what I’m doing in a format that feels just as fun as the writing. I love the community aspect of YouTube as well.
I had to set a goal. This has been a tricky one for me because in the last few years, I would set a goal and after a few chapters get bored with the story. I think goals are great, but there’s something about it that I hadn’t quite figured out. This was definitely internal and I just couldn’t keep up with any of the goals that I had. I’d set one and get flip floppy and jump to another. I don’t quite have the words to define it just yet, but know that there is a goal that fits what I need it to be for the future goals that I have (of being a published author).
I had to define an avenue that gave me wiggle room, but also forced me to stay on track. Again, I get how weird this sounds, but my life is full of contradictions, so I’m just rolling with it. I have the overarching goal. I know what I want eventually, and I even have a goal for this year. Maybe that’s what my next post will be about. However, I had to set a goal that’s not going to change the trajectory of my major goal, but that could still work within the creative sphere and writing in the world that I love.
The goal:
Become a published author with a sustainable career (eventually) writing the stories that I love.
Choose a story and stick to it. This is an old one. Viewers of my YouTube channel will know that I’ve gone back to project DW with plans of finishing it this year as part of the over arching goal. In going back to project DW, I’d also like to knock out some of the story ideas that I’ve loved, knocking them out to-do list style. But that felt wrong because many stories don’t fit with publishing standards, and I’ll get to that.
The wiggle room comes in how I want to set up the stories after. I have several books that I want to write and am in the process of writing right now, but that don’t align with the world I write in. I had plans of writing these stories to publish them after project DW, but they didn’t fit the theme or style of Project DW. They’re all stand alone novels set in different worlds and undefined time periods. While they all have distinctly “me” voices, they’re all still completely different as far as modern indie publishing standards go. However, there’s one feature of project DW (and this world as a whole) that makes it possible to tell a larger story than just the world intricacies of each individual novel. I’ll explain more about this later, but for now, this is the idea that I’m going to latch on to. Using this one feature, I can create interconnected stand alone novels (as is standard practice in indie spaces) that could span several different novels that tell the grander story throughout. This feels better for a few reasons. For one, it aligns with what everybody deems as “best practices” for indie publishing while still allowing me full creativity to choose what I do next. Second, I don’t have a second story planned out yet, which means that I’ll have the freedom to have fresh new ideas for the world, which is what I live for!
This is going to take some time, and I’ve come to terms with that. The main thing is stability for my family, which means I have to have a plan for when I actually do go full time. This is very far off, though there are steps I’m taking now to make sure I can do it when the time comes. The next thing is my degree. I’m currently a double major in Anthropology and Creative Writing. If you want to know the why, maybe I’ll do a YouTube video about that. Eventually, I’ll be doing a capstone project in each degree program (within the next two years) and this will probably take several forms. At some point I’ll have to take time for that, but I don’t know what it’s going to look like yet. However, it’s really nice to feel like I’m climbing that mountain again. There were times when I knew I was going to fall right back down and there was nothing I could do to stop it. It felt like I’d never be able to get back up again. I know now that that’s not true, that mental health comes and goes, as do disasters, life changes, etc. and every time I get back to it I prove to myself that I can persevere a little longer next time.
Thanks for being here! Until next time, keep writing forward!
-Anna
