writing

Attempting to focus

Posted by Michelle on Aug 31, 2010 in writing | 2 comments

Reading to write

The month of August has been spent practically killing myself at the keyboard, trying to deal with some recent financial issues. It hasn’t been easy but we’re pulling through and it looks like we’ll be okay for at least the foreseeable future. Praying to God that nothing totally disastrous happens in the meantime… The economy really has me uneasy these days.

The Hubs ™ hasn’t been too happy with the fact that I’ve been pulling serious writing overtime. It couldn’t be helped this month, unfortunately. When I first began to stay home, we agreed that I would pursue freelance writing as a supplemental income but that my goal, along with taking care of The Little Empress, would be to get my novels written and (hopefully?) published.

While I have been working on my novels, I admit that I haven’t been working on them as much as I should have been. Life just gets in the way. But this last month reminded me that while I do like the freelance life, my dream is to become a published fiction author. And that won’t happen by just sitting around and talking (or writing) about it.

I’m challenging myself to actually do something about this goal rather than sit on my ass six months from now and wonder where the time went. There’s no guarantee that whatever I write will sell but a manuscript is much better than just an idea. I’ve set myself a concrete work goal as far as my fiction is concerned. I’m looking to finish my novel by December and begin work on another novella as well. Two very different stories. I’m sort of torn about doing NaNoWriMo come November. I’ve always loved the idea but I don’t know if the pressure to make word count will work for or against my creative process. We’ll see.

And yes, I’ve made a new blog for my fiction: Truth via Fiction. There’s nothing there quite yet but hopefully I’ll have something to show for myself in the next few weeks….

Do I miss it?

Posted by Michelle on Dec 12, 2008 in Life, WAHM, writing | 0 comments

While surfing LiveJournal’s attachedparents community, I backtracked a little to read a post by a mother who was currently on the fence about becoming a stay at home parent. She asked a couple questions of others who have given up their careers for the sake of raising their children including this one:

What about doing so [giving up your career] do you regret?

The question struck a chord with me and has been in the back of my mind for the last day or so. What, if anything, do I regret? And I realized… I don’t miss my former job. Furthermore, I realized that I don’t miss my former career. It was something I had worked at, toiled at and frankly, was good at. Very good. I recieved nothing but universal praise for the work I did.

But when it came right down to it, I didn’t love what I did. Even before I became pregnant, I began looking for ways to do what I loved — writing. In between doing work, I’d jot things down in a notebook, write snippets of stories, write reviews and articles for the sake of doing something I loved to break the monotony working.

Now, I’m doing two things I love: taking care of The Little Empress and slowly but surely, making a new career as a freelance writer. Nope, I don’t miss what I used to do but I absolutely love what I am doing now.

NaNoWriMo? No, NaBloPoMo!

Posted by Michelle on Nov 1, 2008 in Life, writing | 0 comments

November is the month that hosts the National Novel Writing Month contest or as it is also known NaNoWriMo in which participants attempt to pen a 175 page (50,000 word) novel in 30 days. Broken down, this averages approximately 1,666 words (give or take) a day.

I’ve participated in NaNoWriMo for three years, never once breaking the 10,000 word mark. Honestly, I think I can easily pound out 2,000 words a day if I were simply sh’tting words out of my fingers (kind of like I do here) but the challenge of NaNoWriMo is to write a novel which implies plot, structure, etc. My previous NaNoWriMo attempts were stories that took place in my own made up worlds near and dear to my heart and I realized that while it can be a great prolonged brainstorming, “I need words on paper NOW”, month, I was in general unsatisfied with the quality of my work. After all, NaNoWriMo is about quantity and not quality. It may work for some but it definitely did not work for me.

I’d heard about National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo) last year. Since NaNoWriMo isn’t an option for me, I decided to get serious about my blogging in November and bang out one post per day from November 1st to November 30th. Follow me on my two blogs — Mommy Misadventures & Delishiono!