A breakthrough

Something wonderful has happened: my love of writing has returned, and I couldn't be happier about it. I said I wouldn't write another blog post until something profound had happened and when I wrote that bold statement, I of course had no belief that something would actually happen and instead imagined amassing all the digital cobwebs until this blog ceased to exist. This blog is not for anyone else but me really and is more of a log of my still relatively new writing journey and through documenting all my highs and lows, I've definitely noticed a pattern emerge. I'll explain about that more in a minute. First, let me break down what's happened since my last post:

In the first week of August I was working practically every spare minute of the day and had no time to even think about writing, let alone do it. At the beginning of the second week of August I was completely run down and with that came my tendency for the last few months to declare on a loop 'What the hell am I doing with my life?!?' The following day I went to stay with my mum and did a lot of thinking about what I was going to do. I have said this before but for most of my teenage and adult life, if something wasn't working, or if I had no self-belief or it had simply happened at the wrong time, I'd give up for fear that if I really tried and failed, I'd be a failure. I had a couple of days of some really deep soul searching - and a few mini breakdowns about my future, natch. I know I'm still young (28) but I'm at the age where I should at least have an inkling of how to go about what I want to do. Well, I was feeling trapped and confused about what to do for the best but on Thursday (11th) I decided to sit down with my mum and write a very simple list which had a total of 10 WORDS. These ten words gave me focus and cut out all the middle man - suddenly I had an end goal and at the top, I had the things I was doing/going to do to get there. Suddenly what I had to do didn't look all that scary and somehow, the pressure I had been slowly putting on myself over time had been taken off my shoulders. I moved on then to look at how much I could write logically each day without getting overwhelmed and worked out that I could easily fit in an hour a day, with the addition of a lifetime ban on word count goals. So the plan would be to basically sit for an hour in front of my laptop and see what happened. Because I had put all this in place it took away something HUGE: panic. In the past when I have panicked about what I am going to do with my life, I rush the thing I love and go about things in the wrong way and end up hating it. That is what I did with writing last November when I attempted to do NaNoWriMo then again, when I took it back up this June. I was so desperate to change my life that I told myself I had to do x amount of words a day and be finished on x date - in turn anything I did, didn't feel good enough and I ended up having periods where I gave up completely and put all the excuses under the sun in my way.

So, the following day (Friday 12th August), I read through with Mum what I had written so far and even though there are ridiculous parts, places where you can see my heart isn't in it and a fair few expositional word dumps, it showed promise. It's funny, the places where I decided to just write because I felt like it with no pressure on myself are the bits that are by far the best and really flow. Here are my daily writing totals for the last week:

Saturday 13th August
752 words
Sunday 14th August
1,186 words
Monday 15th August
I wrote 934 words in 38 minutes and experienced what can only be described as sheer excitement and exhilaration. The first two days were a warm up for this. Pure joy.
Tuesday 16th August
Before work I wrote 1,349 words and loved every single moment of it. The time went too fast though and I just wanted to keep writing.
Wednesday 17th August
I wrote 1,222 words and like yesterday, and the day before that, it was truly wonderful.
Thursday 18th August
I wrote 1,515 words. A broken record I know but, guess what? I LOVED IT. I wrote for an extra 15 minutes as I couldn't help myself.
Friday 19th August 2016
Today I decided to write for 2 hours for the simple reason that I wanted to and wrote a total of 2,024 words.

So in the week where I vowed not put pressure on myself, I wrote a total of 8,982 words. Not bad going.

In other news, I've taken down my short story CIRCLE from Amazon as I felt I needed to concentrate on my WEIGHTING TO LIVE series. It feels like the right thing to do and recently because I've taken the aforementioned panic out of my life, I've been able to get on more with marketing too.

Until next time.