IWSG: The best month for writing?

-

 

It's the first Wednesday of the month, and that means time for the Insecure Writer's Support Group post. The IWSG is the brainchild of the amazing Ninja Captain Alex J. Cavanaugh. Since we are all insecure and can use all the support we can get, huge thanks to Alex and this month's co-hosts,
Pat Garcia, Sylvia Ney, Liesbet @ Roaming About Cathrina Constantine, and Natalie Aguirre!

 

Each month we have an optional question to spark discussion. 

This month's Optional Question: are there months or times of the year when you are more productive than others, and why?

Let me know what you think!

I think this is the flip side of the question about when it is hard to write, or what makes it hard. I've commented in the past that travel/vacations mess with my ability to write regularly, since there tends not to be a lot of down time, and a lot of distractions. Aside from the obvious corollary that writing happens more when I'm at home, I'm not sure when I write best. The truth is that I don't really know what life looks like going forward, so I might not be able to give a reasonable answer to this question.

But: in the past, my most productive writing times have been ones without travel, and usually with the extra incentives that NaNo offers. By incentives, I mean both the gimmicky things like the histograms showing progress toward the utterly arbitrary 50,000 words, and the community of writers who are all doing the same thing, and offering support and encouragement to each other. So November, despite the holiday distractions, has been a productive month for me in many years. This year I'm hoping to be ready to start a new novel in January or February, and to dive in hard and fast, NaNo-style, once I'm set.

 #

The Writing Report: Unlike other Novembers when I've had a novel going, this year I was just editing and organizing old stories into collections, and when I took off to spend Thanksgiving with a small corner of my family, progress on that ground pretty much to a halt. The project just didn't have the sense of urgency drafting a novel does. Still, I need and want to finish the collections, so I'll be ready to get back to Death By Donut as soon as my beta readers are done with it. So I guess I'd best get cracking! 

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Let us know what you think! We love to hear from our readers!

Popular Posts

#WEP--The Scream

-
Image
WEP challenges are FREE and open to all. On the 1st   of the challenge month, there will be a   get-your-thinking-caps   on post. The badge will include the dates of the challenge and the winner’s   prizes. The InLinkz sign up will open on the third Wednesday and close 3 days later. It will contain no news, just the sign up. Participants link up with their DLs (Direct Links to their entry).  Learn all about it here .    My entry this time is based on an actual incident. Mom and my brothers will recognize it. My apologies to them for the non-trivial liberties I took with history and their personalities. We are now also meant to provide a tag line for our stories, so here's mine: What terrors lurk in the root cellar?     The Scream The house we lived in that year wasn’t much. The wind blew in everywhere you could imagine a draft, and some places you couldn’t. The old enclosed porch we used as a root cellar was worse. It wasn’t just the win...
Read more

Non-fiction Audiobook Review: Falter, by Bill McKibben

-
Image
Important stuff, but hard to hear. Title: Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? Author: Bill McKibben. Ready by Olivery Wyman Publication Info: Macmillan Audio 2019. 11 hours. Hardback by Henry Holt & Co., 291 pages. Source: Library Blurb: (Goodreads): Thirty years ago Bill McKibben offered one of the earliest warnings about climate change. Now he broadens the warning: the entire human game, he suggests, has begun to play itself out. Bill McKibben’s groundbreaking book The End of Nature -- issued in dozens of languages and long regarded as a classic -- was the first book to alert us to global warming. But the danger is broader than that: even as climate change shrinks the space where our civilization can exist, new technologies like artificial intelligence and robotics threaten to bleach away the variety of human experience. Falter tells the story of these converging trends and of the ideological fervor that keeps us from bringing them under control. And t...
Read more

#WEP: December Flash Fiction Challenge

-
Image
This December challenge wraps up the year of artistic inspiration from some great works of art. The WEP is open to all, following the simple rules: 1. SUBMIT your name to the list below on December 1 thru the 15th . Add your link (URL) 2. POST your entry, put WEP is in the TITLE along with The Narcissus badge within your entry. 3. STATE feedback preferences and word count at the end of your entry. 4. READ other entries, giving feedback if requested. 5. SHARE THE CHALLENGE on social media. Tweets are ready on the WEP blog. PLEASE NOTE: ENTRIES CLOSE Dec. 15th @ midnight (NY Time - check WEP blog clock) ALL GENRES WELCOME except erotica - 1,000 words maximum My story for this month's challenge is maybe cheating a little--I didn't write it for the challenge, but I decided that the common understanding of Narcissus and narcissism fits well enough, even if the story doesn't relate to the painting. I wrote this while trekking in Nepal last month, highlighting a character w...
Read more