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| PSA: if anybody gets an email professing to be from a book club that has selected their book that's on WdC (the one that I got was from "Boulder Bookaholics Club") this is a known scam. Do not engage, just delete it. (A pretty obvious scam in my case because they picked a book I have not finished writing to "feature". That is...not how anything works.) |
| "I could start a file of short stories for the year," I thought to myself, earlier today. "Why not, I might even get 52, you don't know" (Ha ha, Raven, yes you do too know, HA HA) And the answer is, I almost always get a banger opening for a story and then have no idea where it's going to go. I have one right now. In fact I got TWO banger openings for TWO different stories and now I'm walking around my house, and fixing dinner, and mad at my brain for being good at opening lines and bad at... everything else. |
| Opening is ok, but what if this was moved to the middle? Or, perhaps it is the ending waiting for the beginning and middle. Are you looking in the right place or is the view a bit off? Are the ideas, characters, or plot hostage to the editor? Is this supposed to two parts of the same story, or is it separate parts looking for a story? |
| Good morning! Did you do your morning pages? Yesterday I wasn't really feeling my morning pages in the morning but sort of did them like I floss my teeth, then I had a wobble yesterday (false alarm about something that made me anxious for like four hours). I dumped a bunch of that anxiety into...call them afternoon pages. They did help. Yesterday was also the first wobble in one of my projects for 2026, which should probably have a catchy name but I'm just calling it "pretend it's 1998". In other words, the internet lives in the computer, phones live on the wall, and the news is only available for a half hour per day unless you have cable. I found myself dinking on my phone yesterday because I was anxious, which taught me I need better babygate software on my phone (I do not rely on willpower to make me do the thing I want to do, because that's dumb - willpower is finite and constantly stretched). AND I probably need a bigger suite of stuff to do when anxious. I find if I'm stressed my creativity kind of dries up--or actually, I suspect, gets redirected into managing the crisis. I know other people have the opposite experience, they can sink into their writing when they're stressed and use it as a stress-reliever. Which one are you? Or are you somewhere in the middle? |
Raven  - Smiles and nice comments are free to give away and may make someone else's day. You never know. |
| Stress is not a companion usually. Because of working with animals large and small I learned to turn on and off my energy focused on the situation such as when horses run and you need to become big and bad in order to get them to turn away from where they are headed. As soon as they turn I become calm again. This ability trans ferret into other life situations. Most of the time my stress is a calm stress or no stress and focus on resolving the situation as needed. It takes a lot of practice to learn to manage stress and it can be done one small step at a time. |
| Good morning! Did you do your morning pages? As is to be expected, this morning (like yesterday) the first thing I wrote in my pages was "I don't want to write these this morning" because, well, I did not. Everything you do in a day takes something--time, energy, gumption--but some things pay you back interest, and other things don't. One of my little projects this year is to focus more on the stuff that pays me back, and less on the stuff that does not. Thus, I'm going for morning walks and listening to full albums and doing morning pages and doing my #$@! stretches. (I hate doing my @#$! stretches. But I have a creaky hip and it gets creakier if I don't do them.) And I'm smiling at my neighbors. What are some things you do that pay you back? (This is not "no pain, no gain", and this is not "well, I know I SHOULD learn Spanish and do Crossfit".) |
Ichabod Crane  - I've done Chai Tea a few times and quite enjoyed it. In fact, I might look for some the next time we go shopping.  |
Always Humble Poet PNG- 📓  - I feel like doing Tai Chi and then afterward having a Chai Tea could be quite a rewarding ritual. (I have some garam masala in the cupboard and it's gray skies here today, maybe I should make some.) |
| Today I had the scintillating experience of organizing my pantry, putting all the things in it that are not food in one spot, and counting everything. I have concluded I need to have a garage sale or something. Do you know how many coffee-brewing implements I have in this house? And I broke my French press years ago, so at one time it was even WORSE. |
| Always Humble Poet PNG- 📓 - 1 12 cup coffee maker 1 Nespresso 1 actual espresso machine 1 Moka pot 1 camping percolator/regular stovetop percolator It's revealing, is what I'm saying. |
| We were in the same boat, but we downsized a lot of items we seldom use to a local church that has a free store for those in need. Even so, we still have a lot of stuff in a storage unit that we have to go through. The sad part is, once we get done redoing the fifth-wheel camper, we'll likely have to purchase items to put in it. Hang on to stuff, and it collects dust, never gets used, or ends up broken, but if you give it away, you end up needing it. |
| Good morning! Did you do your morning pages? I did my pages today through a batch of the Don't Wannas, and realized that I should talk about what to do in case of the Don't Wannas. With something like morning pages, of course, you are your own boss, and if you don't wanna you don't have to. But it's helpful for me to overcome my perfectionist tendencies by having a fallback. This is useful in any other kind of work, too--say you set a goal to write 1000 words per day, but you're not feeling it. Maybe the kids are sick, or you didn't sleep, or whatever. You're manifestly not going to get your thousand words. Fine. Go to your fallback position, and just get 100. (You can even have a fallback from the fallback, and just get 10.) For morning pages, what I told myself was "okay fine, if you don't want to get three pages this morning, just get one." I ended up getting three once I was into it, and had my stream-of-consciousness flowing. So fallbacks are my Useful Tip of the day. Over in the forum this week, we are talking about how to get past giving ourselves the writing yips, and I argue with the concept of affirmations: "Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Chapter One - The Good Parts Version"  by Raven . (I wonder if "just get one" counts as a slogan?) Come on over and join us, in being happy and healthy writers in 2026. Or don't, I'm not your mom.
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| In other news, I finally finished the structural and word count edits of what we were calling Last Year's WIP (except now it would be 2024's WIP)! Yay! Now I reread it from the beginning, get feedback from a few kind people, and then yeet it to my agent so it's on HER desk instead of mine. And then, friends, I stop thinking about it for a while and move into the next project. If anybody would like to read it, let me know, and I will send you the passkey.
When the thaumic healer Andrew finds a dying man in the chapel of his monastery, his safe, predictable life is upended. Dana Ash is a Pyr, a member of the faction that murdered Andrew's family long ago. When Andrew panics and stabs Dana with an enchanted knife, the magic in the blade binds them irrevocably together. Dana has a secret of his own: the magic inside him makes him a weapon, and he's fleeing from his own countrymen, hoping to escape before they can use him in the war to cause untold destruction. Now Dana and Andrew must find a way to sever the magic connection between them before the evil weft-lord Nynneth Tane can capture them both and use them to win the war--and before the feelings between them become undeniable. |
| Good morning! Did you do your morning pages? (What are you on about, Raven, morning pages, this sounds like nonsense - here: "Note: Happy New Year! Who is doing The Artist's Way ...") This year the Husband and I are concentrating on pursuing contentment and gemütlichkeit (which in English is like... coziness? homeyness?) and one of the things we are instituting is the Sunday Night Movie of the Week, because I have fond memories of watching the Wonderful World of Disney at my grandparent's house and eating popcorn and ice cream for dinner. Last night we watched The Fantastic 4 with the kids, which I loved for the MidMod set design and the constant thread of little background jokes. But one kid had been complaining of a scratchy throat all afternoon and by the time the movie was over, he was pretty definitively feverish. Woo! I thought it was too good to be true that we got through all our holiday travel with no colds. So my morning pages were all about sick kids and all the stuff in the world that is NOT gemütlich. The sick kid had an appointment today, which I now need to call and reschedule, because they very much do not want sick kids at appointments. I will call as soon as the clinic is open, and then I will put chicken in the crockpot for soup. Chicken soup IS gemütlich. |
| I booted up Scrivener this morning and it has a little thing on its load screen where it says things like "loading fonts...loading backups" and then it said "loading spell checker engine" and I rudely thought "WHY". (Scrivener has the worst spell checker in the world, worse than MS Word, which is saying something.) |
| Good morning! Did you do your morning pages? Over in the forum today we are discussing chapter one of The Artist's Way, all about using affirmations to trick your brain into not freezing. I hate affirmations. You can hear me whine about them here: "Chapter One - The Good Parts Version" by Raven
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| Good morning! Did you do your morning pages? I woke up before anybody in my family today, crept out to the living room, and scribbled in my notebook for 3 pages like a wizened gnome. The wizened-ness was probably caused by my very stereotypical action, Jan 1, of reorganizing half the garage into a gym and doing a weights workout for the first time in a bajillion weeks. Thus, I am still shuffling around this morning yelling MY HAMSTRINGS! (Okay, lets be honest with each other: I am yelling MY BUTT! because wizened gnomes are not good at anatomy.) Over at the forum we are talking today about Julia Cameron's Basic Principles, which I argue with. "Julia Says, Raven Argues: Basic Principles" by Raven Et voila:
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| Also, this year I'm trying to remember to pull some of my stories out of storage, as it were, and feature them now and then on the Newsfeed, for them as might not have seen them when I first finished them (and then forgot about them). Here is one: It feels weird to say I like the magic system in this story, because I think it would be horrible to be stuck with, but I think the idea of inputs/outputs is a solid one. But I do really like Lak, the protagonist in this story, which would make him very uncomfortable to know. Then again, it's difficult to think of anything that does not make Lak uncomfortable, so. |
| I think I have put all the holiday shenanigans to rights in my house, and set myself up as best I can for success for the next little while. I even got some editing done today, so that's a plus. Tomorrow, hopefully, I will get a bunch of reviews written for my long-suffering pals On Here, and also some edit notes for a pal Not On Here, and then do some housekeeping around the site. And THEN maybe I will get the first brand-new words of the new year. Who can say. |
| Good morning! Did you do your morning pages? Raven, I did my pages and the thing is they were stupid. They sounded childish. They were all about my lunch and stuff and not at all about writing. I didn't have any breakthroughs. I think this whole thing might be kind of stupid. Good, it's working. I'm serious. The point of the morning pages is to clear out your head of the stuff that's been stuck looping in your back brain, stuff that when it is written down your brain will go "oh, I guess we can quit thinking about that now". It's to surface things that are bothering you that you haven't actually looked at ("oh, right, if I just move that chair then I lower the barrier to actually reading in the evenings, because I'll be closer to the light") and it's to get you in practice of writing without stopping to edit yourself. Because look, friend, you don't edit morning pages. You don't cross anything out. You're not Writing, you're just writing. I keep comparing morning pages to piano scales, but it's really true. Playing your scales isn't playing the piano--you're not exactly making music. Your limbering up your hands and training your muscle memory so that when you hit a hard run in an actual song you don't have to think "now I move my thumb". Morning pages are that for words. You are training yourself to dump words directly from your head onto a page, and you're also clearing out all the stuff in your brain that doesn't help you. I did my morning pages today on my back porch. If you did yours, drop a note here, or over in the forum where we are chatting about this stuff:
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