ALYSSA LOST IN SPACE

Hello. It’s been a while.

I mentioned in a previous post what a struggle it has been to keep up with a demanding blog schedule on top of writing my book and everything going on in my personal life.

There were no Writer’s Diary posts last month and the reason for that is a simple one – I made next to no progress where my writing was concerned.

April had not been nearly as productive as I’d have liked. And my first thought is automatically one if failure – I failed to be productive. To get work done. To schedule my time more effectively. Which I’m not wrong about. I did fail, where my writing was concerned. But I had other obligations, and I spent a lot more time reading and playing video games. Relaxing. ‘Refilling the Well’ as they say. I’m trying really hard not to focus on the failure part. It’s not easy juggling so many things at once, and I need to allow myself that space to fail and try again, hopefully with a better result. What matters, in the end, is that I keep trying. That I grow as a person and adapt my methods to suit my skills and needs.

It can be a hard thing to remember when all you see is the empty space in your notebook where April should be.

I’m hoping May is a bit more productive, so you should see more Writer’s Diaries popping up. I’m still unsure what to do about the blogging situation. So, for now, I’m going to keep at it. I have something planned this weekend that should certainly help…

24-in-48 Writing Marathon

In lieu of my lack of writing, I decided to issue myself something of a challenge. This idea was heavily inspired by the 24 in 48 readathon which came about from fairly similar reasoning. It captures the thrill of a 24-hour marathon without causing you to burn out.

The premise is simple. Over a 48 hour period, you must spend 24 of them writing. I’ve tried 12-hour and 24-hour writing marathons and they just didn’t work, so I decided something with a bit more flexibility might suit me a little better.

Of course, Game of Thrones is on at 9pm on Sunday, and I want to make sure I am finished by then. Thus, the writing marathon starts on Friday, May 10th, 2019 at 9pm Eastern Standard Time and ends on Sunday, May 12, at 9 pm. EDIT: Life happens. Owing to that I have bumped my writing marathon forward a bit. It’ll start at 7 am on Friday, May 10th and end at 7am on Sunday, May 12th. I have that span of time to write for at least 24 hours.

The goal of this writing marathon is to

a) Finish several chapters of Peculiar Casebook

b) Draft at least a month’s worth of blog posts

If I can do that, I can dedicate the second half of the month to my Far North revisions. The end of the month especially I will be doing a lot of prep for my friend’s bridal shower, so the more I get done at the start of the month, the better shape I’ll be in at the end.

Over the next week and a half, I have a pretty heavy schedule set up to help me get the first draft of Peculiar Casebook finished and a good chunk of that will be happening over my writing marathon this weekend.

I also purchased a dry erase wall calendar because I was finding it something of a struggle knowing what to work on without some sort of plan laid out. I spent an hour or so setting this up and filling it with tasks to help me process what exactly I need to get done and what order I need to do it in. I ended up using post-its for this after I was inspired by Sarra Cannon’s HB90 method, and you can check out a video of her explaining this process. Obviously, this is not over 90 days, but I liked the idea of removing post its as I completed tasks. If it works well for me for 30 days I might play with the idea of something longer. But for now, 30 days will do.

Let Me Know What You’ve Been Working on!

That’s how my week went, and now I want to hear from you! What have you been working on in the past week? What do you hope to finish in the next seven days? Let me know in the comments down below!