Returning to the Land of Blogs

It's been a while. So much has happened, and is happening, both in my world and the world at large. Most on my mind nowadays are the wars in Ukraine and Israel because I have family in both countries, so you can imagine what my news feed looks like. My husband recently commented that he doesn't know how I can stand to look at it at all with all the horror that's a lot more immediate than the usual human-nature view of "this sort of thing happens to someone else". But what am I supposed to do, wait for the news to tell me my home town's been overrun by terrorists? Not going to happen, so I read what's in the news feed. It's scary, I worry about my family, and it takes some doing to remember to concentrate on things I actually have control over.

Speaking of which. I've been writing consistently and am a lot closer to finishing the Magical Novel. Yes, there's still no title, and since this is only the first draft it's ok. I figure there's plenty of time to pick a title, otherwise I'd be reminding myself of that kid in John Corey Whaley's Where Things Come Back who kept a running list of novel titles but didn't actually write any novels. Funny thing about first drafts: I thought I'd be done at around 70K word mark, but now that I'm almost there (or am there, it can be hard to tell with writing longhand in a notebook and not typing up the pages too often) it's quite obvious that it'll be closer to 100K, or even higher.

The notebook helps a lot. The Internet is officially the writer's worst enemy when it comes to being productive and getting words on the page, so by eliminating the temptation I'm able to get quite a bit accomplished. Well, quite a bit for a slow writer. I've been trying for a minimum of 14 notebook pages a week, which comes out to 3200+ words a week on average, nothing to sneeze at for a part-time writer with a full-time day job. I am thinking about cutting back a little though. I've been writing so much that I haven't been reading at all, and everybody knows writers need to read. I've got a comfortable reserve of pages to send to my crit group, so I'll be slowing down for the foreseeable future. Will let you know how that goes.

To keep myself on track I went even more old-school than pen and paper: I got a chalk board, drew a grid, and have been logging my daily page count in it. Seeing those numbers line up strokes the ego like you wouldn't believe, and my husband has an excuse to be even more supportive of my efforts than he is already, which is nice.

Also, revisions loom large on the writerly horizon. I keep catching myself thinking about how to tighten the plot, how to streamline the characters, what to cut and what to add. I'm more a pantster than a planner (although writing an outline before NaNoWriMo definitely helped), so plotting like this feels like I'm on a new level, feels grown up in a way. Kind of scary and exciting at the same time.

I've been reading more about writing lately, and here the Internet is actually helpful. Twitter alone is a  great resource, through it I found mswishlist.com and now check it regularly. My other 2 go-tos are Chuck Wendig's Terribleminds and Anne R. Allen's blog. If you aren't frequenting these two and/or mining the archives for treasure you really should. Because there's treasure and everybody's welcome.

So that's what I've been up to. Hope your writing's going well too!

The long hiatus

My friends, I haven’t been posting in a very long time. My apologies for that. I don’t know when I’ll be back. I haven’t been reading much lately because for over three months now I’ve been dealing with health issues in the family, and at the same time watching events unfold in my home country, Ukraine.
Here in the States my husband has had two surgeries since November, one ER visit, and his existing conditions became aggravated because he’s been unable to do his therapy exercises. He is healing slowly, but we still have a long way to go before he is as close to normal as possible.
In Ukraine a protest became a standoff, which became an armed conflict, which in turn became a revolution. Close to a hundred people died, hundreds were injured, many disappeared, a president was voted out by the parliament, a new government was established, and before the people could celebrate their blood-soaked victory a war broke out. You may have heard about all that on the news. If you haven’t, here’s a post on the New York Review of Books, which will shed some light on the events, and here’s a slide-show that will show you what the NYTBR can’t show in a blog post. These posts are a few days old, and the situation changes hourly, but they do provide a background. As of this morning no shots have been fired, but the Russian fleet has given the Ukrainian armed forces till 5 AM tomorrow morning to surrender, after that they will begin full-on attack. All of my family is still in Ukraine, and although they are not in the middle of the conflict, that may change at any time. You see, Ukraine is not that large of a country, only roughly the size of Texas.
As you can see a lot has been going on for me, a lot to watch and a lot to worry about. I’ll be back when I can. Thank you for bearing with me.