Writing and friends

Helllllloooo!

Do you know what I've been doing lately?

Writing. (If you've seen it, read it in the voice of that Patrick Stewart skit where he talks about acting.)

I have been! I've been writing a lot, so many different stories, and I haven't blogged at all. It saps my writing mojo, y'know. (I've also done other things - I went to Japan for a month, and left Australia not speaking a word of Japanese! I moved house! I helped my boyfriend's parents buy a flat! I've also started on anti-anxiety meds that crushed my creativity for a few months there too, but it's much better now.)

My goal for 2013 was to get a story finished and e-published. As always with deadlines, I'm not anywhere near close. BUT. I have made progress. (Some of it is backwards but ultimately it is good.)

Through Reddit, I recently found a fabulous Beta/writing partner AND an awesome writing/critique community called Scribophile. I also posted the first part of my latest and favourite story up for critique on Reddit. Between beta-ing for my partner,  beta-ing and critiquing on Scribophile, and reading the comments on my Reddit thread, I've decided that honestly NOTHING I have written so far is publishable to real standards. If I release something, I want to be proud of it - and thinking "I'm just gonna bang something out and get it finished and it will BE OUT THERE IN THE WORLD" is not really a great mindset to be in. I think I'll still stick with my same story, but the 10K words I've got so far will probably be scrapped. The 10K words of outlining should still be okay though! I just need to speed the story up a bit and add a little more personality. I think that will help.

Anyway. Now I'm on Scribophile I'm basically just thinking about writing all of the time (especially at work, which is DANGEROUS.) I've joined a few groups and one of them posted a cute prompt that I really enjoyed. Here's something I wrote up in 5 minutes.

Aaaaauggghhhhh

It’s raining outside! It’s raining and cold and I finally have the perfect excuse to sit inside all night and all weekend and just computer it up. I’ve also just emerged from a two month unplanned Internet hiatus (don’t ask about it, suffice to say that dealing with landlords and telcos together is a nightmare).

You would think that with the weather and the lack of communication network and cat videos that I’d have gotten a lot of shit done, and I sort of did, but I sort of spent way too much time and 3G data checking reddit on my phone and also watching actual honest-to-god Free To Air television. (You guys? Commercial television is absolutely horrible.)

I did get some writing done but I think that my desperate clamouring for anything online (as well as the last few Doctor Who episodes for the series, which have had to be planned around the actual television showing) made me too distracted to focus. Now that I have internet back again, I've written more than I did in that two months of enforced offline time. How about that?