As a writer, there have been periods in my life when I was immensely productive. This year has been one of them. We have this writing bot on the Just Write Discord server that I’ve been using to keep track of my writing and word count for the year. I set some goals for myself for the purpose of record-keeping. I tried to keep them small so as not to create a burden or add undue stress.
People often ask me how much they should be able to write in a day. Should never applies because there is no mandate, but the realm of what’s possible is highly variable on a number of factors that have little to do with someone’s typing speed. But there are some statistical trends that we can look at that we’ll delve into later in the article.
I didn’t cross the finish line for NANO this year, and I don’t feel like I failed. I could talk about the stress of the last year (and did on in my personal newsletter), but as I enter the final weeks of 2020, I’ve written close to half a million…
There is a certain kind of writer who attaches no value to their own work on an emotional level. They write for attention. It’s the same kind of “writer” who dreams of writing a book so they’d be rich and famous. This is also the kind of “writer” who wants…
I could spend a whole year talking about the fetishizing of men in fandom because it is widespread and it leads to some truly ugly behavior on the parts of fans. It breeds contempt for show creators and sometimes obsessions with actors that can and have gotten dangerously out of…
Having one fandom can be isolating. Creatively speaking, the canon of your fandom could and probably will provide a very narrow window of exploration. Especially with a fandom that will have no canon material to offer you. One fandom means, you’ll often gravitate toward siloed spaces for your fandom or…
One of the websites I maintain for fandom is the Wild Hare Project. In the scope of things, it flies under the radar quite a bit, which I prefer as it is a writer-focused archive, and that’s straight-up unicorn circumstances in fandom where every single other archive is geared explicitly…
The writing challenge environment isn’t for everyone. Rough Trade is built on personal accountability—everything about the design of the challenge is focused on providing an environment where authors can stretch and challenge themselves. The basic rules stay the same from one challenge to another while the theme changes to give…
Yesterday, I encountered an old writing acquaintance. I wouldn’t call this person a friend because I usually ever crossed paths with them in large writing groups and more specifically, in the annual library write-ins for National Novel Writing Month. There are different kinds of write-ins during NANO and we’ve discussed…
Writers are born. We spring wholesale from the womb brimming with chaotic inspiration waiting to be unleashed onto the page. Because the desire to write is innate, it can be frustrating and disheartening when life gets in the way of our ability to write. I say “life” because it need…
