Chronicles of A Procrastinating Novelist Volume 6: Pending End of the Hiatus
Sooooooo….
Well a little over a year’s worth of blogging has produced exactly what I dreaded. An essentially defunct project at which I’ve poked with little enthusiasm or motivation. However, hindsight and time provide sufficient distance to achieve what I hope is a crumb of objectivity in diagnosing the problems with year one of Chronicles of a Procrastinating Novelist (COPN), and laying out a path to fixing the issue.
1. The Problem: No Focus
"Sometimes about what I’ve learned from the fiction I might be reading. Sometimes updates on the growing pains of a new story. They could be useless lists of ways I waste time when I should be writing. Perhaps a commentary on the cuteness of duck waddling. I’m open to suggestions. Who knows?"
It was a cute idea. Optimistic. But ended in my scrambling for topics, feeling obligated to commentate on current events, feeling mired in guilt and self-loathing for missing self-imposed deadlines and writing dozens of posts which never saw the light of day because half-way through I’d suddenly realize, “Who cares? Barely me.” And so I have 5 scattered posts and a backlog of gifs and media lurking on my hard drive that was discovered during sessions of internet browsing in which I convinced myself scouring Pinterest for interesting quotes constituted “working on the blog.”
The Fix:
Pick a more focused topic. I still loath the idea of writing yet another writing blog or focusing my “author” blog on a topic unrelated to my career as an author. However, the wide-open approach demonstrably failed. But there exists a happy medium. I’ve decided on a rotating schedule of topics which hopefully will impose just enough routine to generate consistent content and allow me to get back to the fiction as quickly as possible. My new goal is to aim for 2 posts per month on a loose rotation: 1. Post on writing 2. Movie review 3. Listicle. 4. Book review 5. Personal/ open topic. Just enough room to breathe, but enough focus to, if all goes well, reinvigorate this so far failed endeavor.
2. The Problem: Insecurity
This is a chronic issue of mine in many arenas, but when it came to COPN, it blossomed into a nice venus fly trap of stifled productivity. Part of this is due to the fact my audience is 90% my current Facebook friends; therefore, I continually found myself thinking, “But what is someone is offended by that opinion? What if someone privately messages me a lecture on why I’m a spoiled, rebellious scumbag whose politics are idiotic? What if it’s boring and no one cares? No one caring would actually be a relief. What if—” You get the picture.
The Fix:
Shut up and write.
3. The Problem: Time Management
Part time, no insurance, low pay or not, working as a writing tutor left me buckets of composition time. My new position telemetry monitoring at my local hospital, while a 3 day per week gig, is a full time 12 hour per shift gig. 12 hours on nightshift. The sum of these facts means I’ve had to reset my basic sleeping, eating, and existing habits, so of course the writing has taken a hit because my time management, which is crummy on a good day, has had to reset as well.
The Fix:
Again, shut up and write. The deeper specifics mean I had to find a new routine for when to write. Happily, this does not mean just on my days off. While 12 hours of tele-teching can be oddly stressful and exhausting, writing is a universal release. I’ve engrained it as a positive thing through years of journaling, so when after 12 hours I sit down to my desk, my brain isn’t fried, it’s relieved to write. I think 2018 should have a far higher collective word count than 2017.
So that’s the plan. Now to stick to it.
Thank you for reading,
B
