My Writing Life 3/27/2015

So this week I came up with a ridiculous little game to play with myself. I decided, for motivation and accountability’s sake to start ‘clocking in’ when I write or edit. I commit to a certain number of hours per week of writing, and a certain number of hours of editing, and I’ve been using the Timesheet app on my phone to create a timesheet. At the end of the week, I’ll give my timesheet to Bear, and he’ll ‘pay’ me a dollar. (We have a bowl filled with interesting coins that I bought from the register when I was working retail, so he’ll be paying me in silver dollars mostly.)

When he pays me, I’ll drop the dollar into a jar on my desk. That way, I’ll be able to see how my work accumulates over the weeks, and have a visual representation of my work.

Is it a ridiculous thing to have to do to motivate myself? Yes. Will it work? I think so.

Also, this week:

* I came up with a (related) idea for a book. “Creative Procrastination: 100 ways to distract yourself from the writing you should be doing”. I would write about things like my creativity altar, the Wiki I want to create for Willowisp and all my characters, the knotted charm I made for inspiration, the planner I made myself. I do a lot of things around my writing life that aren’t actually WRITING. I’ve decided to start writing new ideas like this down into a special channel in my Slack (yeah, that’s another thing I do to distract/organize myself), so that I can refer to them later, once I’ve done the things I need to do and maybe have a little time to play around with something new.

* I’ve spent exactly 6 hours and 42 minutes writing and/or editing. That doesn’t include the timer that’s going now for this post. Oh yeah, I include my blog posts in the ‘writing’ portion of the timesheet. These things take time, especially when I try to insert a picture that I’ve taken myself. It takes time to add the dark grainy borders, folks.

That’s not a lot of time in total, but I’m going to be working pretty solid all day today, and I’m accompanying Bear on set as he films tomorrow night. So I’ll be editing there as well.

As far as writing goes, I’ve actually begun working on my third novel in the Altars series. Granted, that’s a bit ridiculous considering I’m only about 1/3 of the way through the second novel, but I had an idea for how I wanted the book to go, so I started writing it. Now I have a little more direction for the second book, because I know where it needs to end up to get us to the events I’ve written for the third book. Win/win.

* I attended a really great Ogham class through the local Pagan group down here I’ve been hanging out with. I’ve never really gotten into Ogham, and while it doesn’t have much to do with writing, it’s a way that I’m building up the knowledge base of things that I can draw on to create my world. I’m expanding my own spiritual knowledge, but also my pool of magickal concepts that I can draw from and add into my writing.

* Visited Willowisp. Or at least, the real-life area where I set my fictional town. I made an offering there of strawberries, stones, incense, sex, and blood for the ticks.

* Kept going with my Morning Pages. They mostly have become a dream journal since my dreams have been pretty detailed and bizarre lately. This morning’s dream, for example, seemed to come straight from a Silent Hill game.

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My main distraction this week has been videos about watercolor painting, reviews of different watercolor brands, shopping online for watercolors (or at least building wish lists at Cheap Joe’s, because I’m broke), and researching which primary colors are going to work best for the style that I want to paint. I have all these amazing ideas for things to paint, and no paint with which to paint them. (That’s not true, I have a huge set of Twinkling H20s, but I want something a bit more serious and less shiny.)

I get the urge to paint every few years, and I’ll obsess until I get the materials to get some color on paper. So this will be a theme for a while.

Our backyard is completely covered in violets right now.  <3 Our backyard is completely covered in violets right now. <3[/caption]

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