We had a great first Write-In at the Tyler Public Library today! Well, a little chaotic because we were moved to an area that had no places to plug in our computers, but I found us some help. The rest was really good! We had 7 writers total, six that stayed and chatted and one that zipped in late and out early. Met some very lovely ladies that I’m looking forward to seeing again later this week! 🙂
Category: Writing
Here’s how me and my friend Elizabeth dressed up for our Tyler Public Library Writer’s Class Halloween meeting. We went to the coffee house like this first and people were amused. Only one other person at the group dressed up, but we got candy and read spooky stories that we wrote. 🙂 
I wrote 7 scenes yesterday, but my brain could not be bothered to come up with more than 500 words today, which is the lowest limit I allow myself for productivity these days. So I made this list of things I could do that are mostly Writing Adjacent on those days:
- Make list of things to be done
- Scenes
- Outlines
- Character sheets
- Research
- Research things off my Research list
- Write “daily pages”
- Update Writing folders on computer
- Read “Downloaded-yet-Unread Writing Related Articles”
- Sort “Prompts” file by type of prompt for later use
- Figure out what topics I want more info on for the next writing group meeting
- Prepare my 2-page item for sharing at TPL’s Writing Club
- Do coursework for online writing classes
- Help someone else with their writing
So then I did, yay verily, sort all my prompts. Also, dyed my hair teal. It didn’t come out quite how I hoped, but that’s how my whole week has gone.
I have been stuck at home either in my bed or in my favorite chair today because moving is ridiculously painful and just sitting makes me cringe, but have been watching all those videos I have amassed over the last few weeks of being too busy to watch them, so there’s that. Learning about other people’s planner hacks, some new-to-me novel planning procedures, and doing a little background research for the next novel. Have loved being cozy while watching the rain and breezes outside my window.
It’s around the one year anniversary of me taking myself and my writing seriously. It took a big health scare to do it, but I finally started regularly doing the things that make me feel all sparkly inside when I do it. Since then I’ve been writing or reading-about-writing as closely to daily as possible, I’ve joined classes and groups that have helped me not just work on my craft, but also expanded my knowledge of areas of writing and publishing that I had been previously unaware of. I’ve scaled back on a myriad of things that I was doing just because they filled a need for others and have tried to concentrate my efforts on things that I am really good at or knowledgable about (being the secretary for organizations and helping PTA’s learn & grow). Despite some hard times this last year, I feel like it’s been a year of growth and I’m excited to expand on that and start putting my writing out into world this next year. 🙂
I spent all day writing, except when I was organizing some writing, or learning a new writing program. I conceived and wrote the beginnings for 11 new flash fiction pieces. Tomorrow I’ll write the middles, then Wednesday the ends (it’s for an online class). I am currently the calmest I’ve been since, oh, May of 2012 when my mom first got sick. It is really good to spend the day doing something I both really love and am good at. I feel like a real person. It’s nice.
This is basically how I feel every time I get a prompt in writer’s class every week: Everyone else sees the normal bird and writes about it flitting around doing bird things and I see some crazy-assed alien in a shirred off universe and write about that and the whole class goes “what?”
(Update: You’ll have to imagine the comic about the state quarter turned sideways and the image on it looks like a crazy sideways alien-man instead of a bird. It was awesome, but the link died and now I cannot find it.)
In this week’s Fun Things I Do In The Car While Waiting For My Kids: transcribing writing from old notebooks into the computer using Google Voice. You might think autocorrect is the height of frustration, but it pales in comparison to Google Voice’s misunderstanding of my not-quite-Southern-not-quite-MidWestern drawl.
This week I joined another writing group through my public library. The library had advertised it as a new group, but once I got there I found out that it had actually been a group that had met for a few years in another location and been transplanted over to the library, much like my book club was more than a decade ago (that one I quit going to because they changed the time on us and wouldn’t let our breastfeeding mothers feed their babies during group time? Yeah, that was a long time ago). I love my ETWG, but they only meet monthly and I wanted something more regular than that.
In any case, it seems like an interesting group. Most of the other writers are memoirists, which was initially disappointing, but the idea of meeting and having people to read my stuff is invigorating. We wrote some 10 minute writing sprints with prompts, which is not in my wheelhouse. I did awful at it the first time. The second time was marginally better. We shall see how it goes.
Since I cut back on social media and kids have gone back to school, I have read two books (one of them my nearly complete novel), made notes on what needs to be finished in said novel, started and nearly finished this weeks work on a mystery cross stitching project that involves new kinds of stitches and blends, and gone shopping three times for more school supplies and floss. Oh, and attended a brunch, started using a new-to-me online writing group app, and not gone hyperactive with my blood pressure like I have the last several years this time of year. Wahoo me! 🙂 (Also I have drank A LOT of tea. A LOT.)
Lisa Holcomb 