Things I Should Be Doing

Things I should be doing:

• Editing Powerful
• Critting on Scribophile
• Blogging helpful tips about writing
• Sharing witty and insightful tweets about writing
• Walking the dog
• Eating healthy
• Crocheting
• Reading
• Cleaning up Christmas decorations
• Cleaning up everything else

Things I'm actually doing:

• Cuddling the dog
• Daydreaming about Star Wars
• Figuring out exactly how many calories I have left for the day and how much cereal I can eat later
• Pretending I don't have to crit on Scribophile
• Facebooking
• Pinteresting
• Coming up with ideas for my next novel
• Stalking #JanuaryWIPjoy on Twitter

    So, this past week didn't go as expected, like most of my life. I set up my new schedule for this new year, and didn't follow through on a lot of it. I blogged twice, which is a big accomplishment for me. I carefully monitored how often I watched tv, instead of binging shows on Netflix. I did well on going to the gym (I went four times this week despite the tendonitis pain flaring back up). It's definitely something to celebrate. But I didn't follow through on the rest of my plans.

    I could make the excuse that I've been having migraines and that I haven't been sleeping well, but that's just lame. I know that I have been incredibly unmotivated this week, and that I've been incredibly lazy as well. I did not get the chapters edited that I planned to. I did not crit the chapters I planned to, either. 

    You may be wondering what I actually did this week, and the answer is that I wasn't completely unproductive, though I slacked off on the things I was supposed to do. This week, I started inquiring to fellow writers and bloggers about participating in my guest post series (to come at the end of the month). I picked a theme, and I have 5 guests so far. I started writing out my example for the guest post, but pushed it off so that I would actually get some work done (and yes, I did actually edit). 

    So I did get some editing done, and some critting too, it just wasn't as productive as I planned. I spent a fair amount of time building up new Pinterest boards to spark creativity. The first, Magical, is for anything fantasy. Fairies, super powers, castles, etc. and it's super awesome. The other is dedicated to writing prompts and story ideas. Both have actually helped me focus on my writing, though they are also distracting.

    The other thing I worked at a lot this week was planning out my next story. I know, I said I was going to work on my fairy tale retellings next, but they are frustrating me so much, and becoming more and more difficult to work on. So I'm taking yet another break from them to work on something else. 

    The story is an idea I had in 7th grade. I made everything up as I went along, but it worked out pretty well as parts of the plot actually made sense. The characters were all based off my friends at the time, the dialogue was really cheesy, and most of the story had no real point. But there were still some elements to the story that I really enjoyed and wanted to explore more. So I pulled out all my old notebooks that are totally falling apart and as I read through, I kept track of plot points I actually liked, and now I'm forming an actual story out of all the mush.

    I'm super excited for this story, because I've loved some of these ideas for years and now I finally get to do something with them. I started working on this because the creative part of my brain has been seriously underutilized recently and it was making editing harder. So now I'm working on the outline while editing and critting. Once this round of major edits for Powerful is finished, I'm going to start working on the first draft of this next project. At that point, editing will be far less time consuming than it is now (because everything after this will be minor) and I can focus most of my energy on this new project. I'll share more details about it in the future.

    ~Allie