Self Reflection and Uncomfortable Truths... Also, Words Are Hard

 

I did not do well on my overall writing goal for last month which sucks. I think I hit about half of the numbers I wanted to hit. Looking at the numbers now, it was about a little more than half the original goal, but just barely. I’d been just meeting my goal each month, plus or minus a few extra words, up to this point so I didn’t really have any kind of a buffer of this. Which means now I’m going to need to find a way to make up the difference over the course of the next six months. I can’t believe tomorrow is halfway through the year. I need to get more serious about the lunchtime writing sessions and carving out time for writing without distractions.

Honestly, if I would give myself ten to fifteen minutes of absolutely unbroken, uninterrupted writing time a day, I’d probably have my writing goal smoked in no time. For a while, I had a good thing going with the dedicated time to writing, but I fell off, especially after the DragonCon writing workshop disaster. Plus, getting my dream job kind of took over a lot of my life. It’s not that I don’t still need to write regularly and I still want to write regularly, I just don’t need it as much as I did. Adding regular exercise both made it more difficult to add the writing time and it also, I think, decreased the need for writing. And by that, I only mean that my mental and physical wellbeing have more to bolster them than they did previously. But that’s really no excuse to quit writing. If therapy and self-help taught me anything, it’s that do need to keep writing in my life because it’s supposed to be part of my life. There were too many stars aligning for me to believe it wasn’t supposed to be part of my life. Maybe publishing isn’t, at least not for right now, but in general? Even if it’s only writing journal entries and fanfic, I need to keep writing part of my life.

But it’s hard too because I feel like I’m tapped out creative energy wise. I don’t think that’s really a thing. I don’t think you can “use up” your creativity, I think I just feel that way right now. The real problem is likely staying up too late reading books that are all the same as the one I read the night before. That’s a little unfair to the books and authors I read (especially when I think about books like “Claimings, Tails, and Other Alien Artifacts” that recently blew my mind *boom*), but still, my reading habit is more than a little excessive. I may even be using my “I use all my creativity at work” line as an excuse to let me get out of writing so I can read instead. It’s probably also some fear. I mean reading is much, much safer than the risk of writing. And while journaling isn’t dangerous in the way that sharing a fictional story or a blog post or whatever might be, it’s still a little alarming when you dig up nuggets of truth about yourself. If you journal, you will find things out about yourself and your feelings and your bad habits that you may not want to know. I know I face that more than I’d like. Hell, I’m facing that right now.

But those are actually just more reasons why I do need to write instead of avoiding it.

Anyway, bedtime for me.