To Blog or Not to Blog? Is Regular Blogging Worth It?

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June was a busy month for me: I got back into working on my Secret New Novel draft (which won’t be Secret for much longer!), I had a few editing jobs that needed finishing, and I’m *still* unpacking and organizing after my move back in April.

As a result, I realized that I needed a blogging break, and took the last two weeks of June off.  For several years now, I’ve been blogging regularly every week with very few weeks missed, but during June, blogging felt less important than the other, more urgent matters demanding my attention.

Of course, the world didn’t come to an end because I didn’t blog for two weeks.  Instead, I felt more in control of my workload, and felt like I was prioritizing based on what needed to be done.
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Fixed Mindsets vs. Growth Mindsets: A Way of Looking at the World

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Have you ever noticed how some people tend to persevere through challenges by doing their best, while others see challenges as beyond their reach and give up?

Think about the last bad day you had.  Maybe you got chewed out at work, something went wrong with your computer, you made a mistake at home, or you had a fight with a friend.  Maybe you found yourself in a situation where there seemed to be no way out, or where a solution seemed completely outside your reach.

When the bad day was over, did you think about ways that you could actively work to improve your situation?  Or, did you simply accept what happened as inevitable, as being completely outside of your control?

The difference between the two lies in Fixed Mindsets and Growth Mindsets, a concept pioneered by Stanford social scientist Carol S. Dweck about how ingrained patterns of thinking affect our ability to deal with challenges Continue reading »

How to Get the Most Out of a Creative Work Break

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I’m at an odd point in my work routine, and thought I’d reflect on why.

On Wednesday, March 1st, I finished Draft 3 of my Secret New Novel, which I started in January and have been working on four days a week (give or take) ever since.  This development came after finishing Draft 1 in August and Draft 2 in December, which means I’ve been working continuously on this novel for almost a full year.

I want to let Draft 3 sit a bit before diving back in, so part of my work plan for March involves pausing active novel revisions so I can type up the revisions I’ve already made on to the computer, which I estimate to be a 30-35 hour job.  Most of the heavy revisions were in the opening chapters (which thus take longer to retype), and now that those are over with, I’ve settled into a routine of typing out two chapters a day with the goal of finishing by March 17th.

However, typing is different from revising: I like to do it at the end of the workday while listening to music, and it requires a LOT less mental energy than sitting down to actively edit a draft.  This means that while I still have a big typing project to work on (in addition to all the other things on my backlog list!), the type of work I’m doing has changed significantly Continue reading »

March 2023 Novel Update: Third Draft Complete, Typing in Progress…

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The title says it all: last Wednesday at approximately 11:00am Eastern Standard time, I finished Draft 3 of my Secret New Novel.

This comes after several weeks of careful planning, when I counted out the number of writing days necessary to finish Draft 3 if I edited at the rate of one chapter per day.  Though my initial plan was to be finished on Monday, February 27th, some extra difficulties with the final chapters put me behind, so I needed the extra two days to bring the ending up the level I wanted.

The February 27th deadline wasn’t a firm one by any means—it was more of a way to keep myself on track so I could plan the weeks leading up to finishing (which included mostly writing days) and the weeks after I finished (which will include mostly typing days).  So, I made sure to build in a few extra days where I could write in the mornings if I needed to.

Draft 3 is REALLY important because it’s the draft I’m going to send to beta readers (basically, readers who’ll take a look at the full novel draft with an eye for giving feedback).  It also represents the point where I’ll finally, at long last, reveal what the Secret New Novel is actually about on this blog, which is pretty exciting (stay tuned!). Continue reading »

Creative Communities Are REALLY Important

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A lot of creative people harbor this myth of the artist who works alone (usually in an attic or secret studio someplace), slaving away at their life’s masterwork in secret.  “This will be my Great American Novel when it’s finished!” they might cry, or “I’ll show my paintings to the public when they’re ready!”

Here’s the thing, though: while a lot of artists definitely work alone (hell, I wrote an entire novel about this idea), rarely do they work in isolation.

That’s because, for a lot of creative people, while the actual creation process takes place alone (the writing, the painting, the composing, etc.), they still have communities of other creative people they can engage with Continue reading »

October 2022 Novel Update: Organizing Big-Picture Edits

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Happy Halloween, everybody—it’s been a pretty good month for novel writing.

For those who haven’t been following, I finished the rough draft of my Secret New Novel in August, and since then I’ve been revising the draft, printing out each chapter and making changes directly on the page with a pen, after which I type up the edits to make a new digital draft of each chapter.  The process helps me to more easily find areas that need to be cut or changed, but also to look at the novel with fresh eyes when it’s on the page instead of a screen.

Despite my taking a week off from writing in mid-October when some friends visited, I’ve made substantial editing progress this month compared to last month.  That’s party because the first four or so chapters of the draft were in MUCH rougher shape than the rest of the novel.  That meant that when I hit Chapter 5, I suddenly found myself revising faster, finding less to fix, and making more smaller-scale edits than drastic rewrites.

In short, this translates into more pages revised per day Continue reading »

September 2022 Novel Update: Second Draft Revisions in Progress!

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Quick recap: When I last posted an update about my Secret New Novel, it was an exciting one. After a year and a half of methodical research, scheduling writing time, agonizing over plot details, and stepping away for one reason or another, I finally, at long last, finished the first draft!!!!!!!!!!11

While the novel still has a LONG way to go, finishing the first draft was a HUGE deal for a number of reasons:

The first is that, for me, drafting an initial story from nothing is the most agonizing part of the process, and by far the most difficult.  On days when I have to draft something more complicated than a blog post, I tend to spend a lot of time putting off writing and getting warmed up, which translates into less time at the computer actually putting words on the page.  Revising what I’ve already written, in contrast, is far easier, and when I sit down with an earlier draft in front of me that I can look at and improve, I feel less stress and more confidence.

The second reason is that with finishing this first draft, most of the really intense mental brainstorming and creation have already been done Continue reading »

Why I Hate the Word “Content”

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A while back, I worked on a project with someone who had a background in graphic design.  The person had done a lot of layout jobs for magazines, websites, and online publications, and the project we were working on was somewhat similar.  In planning what our layout would look like, she often used the word content:

What kind of content are you interested in running?

I think we really have some great content this time.

Can we get any more content?

And so on.  I see similar echoes all over social media, where sites talk about running content, users absorb increasing amounts of content, and buzz surrounds people who are content creators.

And I’m fucking sick of it Continue reading »

How I Handle Bad Writing Days

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Some days are better than others.  Others, though, straight-up suck.

Since May I’ve been on a spurt of working on my Secret New Novel four mornings a week. That’s four days when I get up, eat breakfast, and then dive into the novel until around lunchtime.  On the one hand, this has helped me get a LOT of words down on the page, but it also causes issues on days when I’m Just. Not. Feeling. It.

I wrote about this a few years back in a post about what I do when I don’t feel like working, but I want to reflect on this problem again because I’ve been spending far more hours a week in the creative realm than I was previously.  Because I’m setting myself up to spend more time writing per week, it’s more likely that a Bad Day will fall on a writing day and interfere with my creative process more than it would interfere with, say, my ability to schedule bill payments or or do a repetitive Day Job task.

These problems arise on days when I’m feeling some degree of depressed, but also on days when I haven’t slept well, I’m worried about something, or Continue reading »

More Creative People Should Talk About How They Pay Their Bills: Notes on Stephen King’s “On Writing”

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When I started this blog waaaaaaaay back in 2016 I’d just gotten out of grad school, where my focus had been developing myself as a writer and honing my craft.  Back then, I’d been getting a lot of advice on how to be a writer: Write every day, write in the morning when you’re fresh, research agents who’ll want to read your work, find critique partners, revise multiple drafts, and so on.

If you were to follow all of this advice to the letter and make writing the focus of your life, it would certainly add up to more than a full-time 40-hour-a-week job—though no one ever came right out and said it like that.

My problem was that while aspiring writers were ostensibly developing their crafts over this 40-hour-a-week period, how were they supposed to be earning money?  Were they supposed to be independently wealthy, so they didn’t have to work?  Were they supposed to be working a part-time job?  Or were they not actually supposed to be devoting that much time to their craft, and carving out time on evenings and weekends instead? (And if they did it during their evenings and weekends, how would they find the time for family and friend relationships???)
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When Should You Stop Promoting Your Creative Project?

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The question in this week’s title is especially relevant for me because as of this week, MFA Thesis Novel has been out for three whole months.  For the big publishers, that’s the typical amount of time in a book cycle, where new releases tend to come in 3-month seasonal waves.

In the past three months I’ve been doing a lot to spread word about the novel: in addition to the pre-order and the novel release party, I also contacted local bookstores about carrying the novel, built a new website page to feature it, talked about it on my email mailing list, answered a few author interviews, listed it in my alma mater news, recorded guest appearances on podcasts, and got some of my writer friends to review it, in addition to pitching the novel around to other reviews sites, bookstores, and media outlets.

I’ve also been doing a mini drive to get more Amazon and Goodreads reviews, which are incredibly helpful for helping people find the book.  (By the way, if you liked MFA Thesis Novel and want to help in a super-easy way, consider leaving me an Amazon and/or Goodreads review!)

In the past few weeks, though, I’ve found myself running out of steam, with fewer bookstores to contact, avenues to explore, and hype to generate.  This has gotten me thinking about a really important question: Continue reading »

Every Creative Person Has Their Bad Days—Even Me

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Part of the reason I keep this blog is so I can keep people in the know about when things are going well or I’m working on cool stuff.  But, I also want to be honest about when things aren’t going so well.

In the past few years I’ve become more aware of online performance—as in, that idea that people only put the best version of themselves online to create an idealized narrative of who they are and how things are going.  We all do this to some extent when we post about great stuff (“Hey, look at my awesome vacation/car/girlfriend/boyfriend/new job/house/really cool hobby!” etc.) but don’t post about our not-so great stuff: For example, how many posts about breakups, massive debt, job loss, or lingering malaise have you seen, unless they were deliberate cries for sympathy?

I think creative people can be susceptible to this as well, especially when they shy away from talking about their setbacks online.  In the long run, this can create an idealized version of the creative life, where it seems like everyone is getting life-changing publishing deals and drawing every day and getting roles in movies and putting amazing art into the world, when in reality they also have the same setbacks and low points you do Continue reading »