I've been thinking

I have been thinking about how I do my blog. It is essentially about how I use writing to hold my life together - hence the title of the blog, creative glue. But I also want to focus more on the craft of writing: what methods I use, everything from the essential hammer and nails of my craft to the minute details. I want to post more details that might be useful to other writers. I am still figuring out how I would be able to accomplish that. I still want to use it as a means of accountability as well - post when I have been doing well with my writing goals and when I have flubbed, and analyze why I may have flubbed. I think seeing my efforts documented like that is helpful to me, and may be helpful to other writers as well - accountability to the goals you set is a major part of accomplishing what you set out to do in writing. In the writer's group I attend, I got a LOT of feedback on Thursday. I had people apologizing for tearing my work up one side and down the other. I was not offended, though. I knew that what I had brought in needed a lot of work. I was excited to have a new perspective and to see what I could do to make it work better. Humility goes a long way when you are revising and getting feedback on your work. That is hard to do because your work is your baby, and you have the innate desire to shelter and protect it. But it cannot get strong if you defend it all the time instead of letting it grow. I was being mature this week, and taking the criticism from my fellow writers, plotting to make good use of it. I am getting excited about NaNoWriMo. It will start in November. (For those of you who haven't got a clue what that is, see www.nanowrimo.org) This will be my third year participating in NaNoWriMo. I have the ideas planned out for what I will write, and it is mostly a matter of doing the arithmetic to see how many words I need to write per day to make the goal of fifty thousand words by the end of November, taking into account the days I will not get the chance to write. I guess that gets to count as my method mentioned for today - set specific goals for your writing so you aren't just floundering. My usual goal is to get at least a thousand words written per day on the novel. I find it works better for me to do it in five hundred word spurts rather than trying to conquer it all at once. If I get more than a thousand, more power to me. If I get just the thousand, I have still made a lot of progress. Specific goals are something that help me make progress.

it's been a while

It has been a while since I have posted in my blog. I am not entirely sure what to write about, because I haven't been writing a whole lot in the last little while. It seems like I go through cycles - times when I do well and writing comes easily, and times when I am distracted by other things and don't get much done. I guess that is human nature in general, but there is something that drives me to accomplish more as a writer, and I feel like I am letting some part of me fail when I am not consistent with my writing goals. That sounds like I am being really hard on myself when I say that, but I really do feel guilty for not having written much. I went to a conference with J out of town, and brought some free writing stuff with me to work on while I was there. It wasn't very practical to bring the novel with me - it is in a file on my old mac, and it is long enough that printing it out would have been more trouble than it is worth. I got some ideas jotted down, but that was about the extent of it. We had cleaned out our kitchen pretty well before heading out on the trip - just for the sake of not having stuff left behind to go bad while we were gone. Now I am in the process of cooking and getting some stuff in the freezer to be quickie meals later. That is taking up a decent portion of my day today. I have made applesauce bread as well as a few batches of chicken pot pie filling to freeze for later. I have some tortilla dough started to go with the chicken enchilada filling that is waiting in the fridge for dinner to roll around. I am thinking that either today or tomorrow, I will make a large batch of burritos and freeze them. I have done that once before, and it was nice to have a quick meal like that on hand. That will be a major production - cooking black beans, rice, and pinto beans, then putting the pinto beans in the food processor with some salsa, and mixing it all together with some corn, cheese, and seasonings. Then I will make a huge batch of tortillas and assemble a bunch of burritos. I wrap each one in foil individually, then store them in gallon ziploc bags. That way, I can use them like you would a store-bought frozen burrito, but they are a lot healthier. I don't put any lard or gook like that in there, and I use brown rice. I guess I am writing on this blog partly to show that although I haven't been writing a lot, I am pursuing some creative endeavors, and partly to convince myself to get some writing done, even if it is just a little. This counts as my own personal guilt trip/motivational speech. Now I had better go do something so I can claim that it worked!