The blog circle on WriYe has been absent since March but quite frankly it’s been that kind of year. I just went back and read my 2020 January post detailing my plans for the year… oh we had no idea did we?

A real gem here: “It’s going to a brand new decade. I really hope it’s better than the last one.”

2020 is almost over (yay!). In a very unpredictable and unstable year, sum up your year of writing.
Did you meet your goals? Did you survive? Barely hung on?

Right my goals were as follows:
“150k target. I want to be consistent with my writing. 4thewords – I intend to use it everyday next year. My aim is to maintain the 444 word streak on the site to make incremental progress everyday. I want a couple of drafts by the end of the year – I want to feel like I made progress ultimately!

In 2020 I intend to move forward with my writing, with the goal to being in a position to start publishing in 2021, and I also want to leap forward with my drawing if I can and do a drawing a month and complete the ‘How to Draw the Marvel Way’ course that I was given ages ago.”

Did I meet them?

Bwhahahaha yeah no. Not even close, not even a little bit.

My 4thewords streak is technically intact but that’s only down to rampant cheating. I’m not sure how many days I actually wrote for but it’s possibly in the region of about 50, if that and only then if I include planning days probably.

I have zero novel drafts. In fact I have zero progress on any original work whatsoever. You see what happened is (well I’m going to quote myself again). I wrote in that 2020 January post: “I know how rusty I am and that everything I write to begin with is going to be even more shit than normal. However I’m not going to get past that and write anything ever potentially decent if I don’t forge on.” but unfortunately panic doesn’t understand logic.

Even before 2020 took a turn for the crazy I wasn’t doing well. I spent a good chunk of January planning out an original novel and I was all set to start, I sat down and kept having panic attacks. I think I wrote 500 words and hated them all. I couldn’t get over how awful I felt it was and I just felt like I would never be good enough.

I haven’t done a single drawing this year. I’m working on one now (in December) but that will be my only 2020 drawing. I didn’t touch the course. I basically achieved NONE of my goals.

Give us your biggest triumph and what you are most proud of!

Well I survived the year. So there’s that.

I’m going to end WriYe with about 70k and that’s entirely down to November. I did the Sanctuary fanfic and I smashed it. Almost 67k and The End. That is my singular success story this year. I suppose that proves that I can write, just in a limited fashion. It wasn’t original work so I managed to bypass the paralyzing panic/fear that stops me from writing normally.

I’m glad I managed to write something, even if it was fanfic, because something is better than nothing. I mean I said that in my NaNo post, “this might as well happen” because nothing else was happening. It was fun writing that in November. I liked writing again. I liked completing the quests on 4thewords. I want to do more of it but I’m just not sure what right now. I need to have a think.

Anyone that knows me knows I have a thing about the terms revision and editing getting mixed up. It’s petty and ridiculous but we all have things we’re stupid about. To me revision is about story, it’s what happens first to turn a first draft into a draft for others. Editing comes afterwards and is more about polishing it up, getting the commas in the right place, checking for typos and perhaps adjusting word choices.

They are different things in my head and I just want that distinction to be clear.

What is your main struggle with editing?  Is it getting started? Rereading your own work? How do you handle it?
This is the question asked for March’s WriYe blog topic. Now if I took the question at it’s word then I would be talking about ‘editing’ aka the polishing of grammar and punctuation. The answer for that is different than the answer would be for revision. My main struggle with editing is lack of knowledge/ability. I tend to punctuate by feel and I make errors in my writing grammatically – I need an editor. I have got a course to try and learn how to be a proof-reader but I’m really struggling to apply the concepts it’s trying to teach. Editing is hard.

Revision on the other hand is something I quite like. It’s analytical and there’s a process to it because it’s dealing with something of substance. I find the actual writing hard because I’m making something from nothing. With revision I’m dealing with something that already exists and that’s a massive help. Years ago I took Holly Lisle’s How To Revise Your Novel course and most of my process is drawn from that.

Another month, another WriYe blog topic! This one is a bit of a doozy and so begins the eternal dilemma of “how honest should I be?”. I feel like I know what the ‘right’ answer is and yet it’s not what is true for me and I’m not sure what that says about me. I guess all I can do is just write from the heart, as I always do with blog topics which is why they are such rambles, and hope that is ok.

I don’t particularly want to be cast out of the writer community haha.

In three days it’s going to be not just a new year but a new decade. I’m going to be 30 next year (*shudders*), and so this New Year feels more landmark than usual, and new years always make me maudlin and retrospective.

I began the decade failing out of one university and I’ve ended it having dropped out of another. I’ve gone precisely nowhere or at least that’s how it feels. I suppose I could reframe it and say that I’ve had a few false starts which have been learning experiences. For instance I now know for certain that higher education doesn’t suit me.

The last few years broke me to be honest, My mental health was bad to begin with, I had a breakdown in 2011 and if anything got steadily worse over the next few years. Returning to uni was my desperate attempt to make a change, the old cliche “if you don’t like your life, then change it”. However, it was a bad move. My depression, anxiety and general stress levels which were already high have gone through the roof. My confidence was always very low but it’s now absolutely destroyed. I’m utterly terrified pretty much all the time.

That’s why I titled this post ‘the end of the beginning’ because if there’s rock-bottom then this is it. Yes I have a past but I really am starting again – something else which adds to the landmark feeling of this New Years. It really is the close of one chapter and I’m trying very hard to think of what’s coming next as the start of something new, hopefully something better.

I wrote a couple of “I don’t know what to do” posts because I’m not being productive how I would like.

Then it got worse.

You know how sometimes it’s not what happens, so much as what it triggers? Well what happened yesterday shouldn’t have been that big a deal but it felt like the final nail in the coffin. I have been feeling very hopeless and despairing and what happened felt like validation of those feelings. I haven’t got even close to halfway with NaNo, I’m writing less in a year than I used to do in a month – I feel like I’m losing myself.

My 2019 creative resolutions mostly boiled down to “be kinder to myself” but after the utter trainwreck that was January I need to remind myself of what I said because I’m not applying it..

This was an actual line I wrote:

forget what I ‘should’ be working on and rediscover my joy in just working on what I please 

and this one

.. to forgive myself when things don’t go according to plan

You see it’s the old ‘I know it intellectually but utterly fail at putting it into practice’ dilemma.

Now half the problem is that I wrote these resolutions during christmas break and even when I try and be reasonable I always underestimate how much of a toll university takes. I hate it, I literally do, there is nothing about it which I like but I’m committed and I wish I knew how to shut off. How to partition my life better so that the negativity about uni didn’t spill over into absolutely everything else making me feel awful all the time. I don’t know if it’s because of my mental issues that I struggle so much at this, or if it’s this hard for everyone (it probably is and I’m just being a wimp).

But anyway, it is what it is and I can’t change the uni part of the equation. I need it too much. I need the student loan and I need the time that loan buys me to get my shit together, which is terrifying me beyond measure because what if I can’t? What if being this utterly miserable and stupid means I don’t, what if this is just a wasted exercise? I feel sick just thinking that. I need to not think about that because it’s too big, it’s too scary and I can’t deal.

Moving on – back to the point of this post which wasn’t to indulge in a pity party, it was to find a solution – “rediscover my joy in just working on what I please”

I was explaining ideas to my friend Marie last night, and I used the words ‘shouldn’t’ and ‘can’t’ several times. I’m still limiting myself, still denying myself, still saying no and it’s logical for me to do so but it’s not working. I’m not working on what I’m supposed to – I’m doing nothing – and so at this point is something – anything – better than nothing?

2012 NaNo comes to mind. I didn’t want to work on Perfidy, I wasn’t feeling it, so I just started typing what was in my head. I wrote 5k of a story which I then abandoned because I went back to Perfidy and wrote the first draft (of that version anyway). So a diversion doesn’t have to be a bad thing, it can lead back to the main road, and if it helps at the time then maybe that’s ok? I can’t even convince myself here.

I still don’t know what to do.

I started this post on tumblr but I just can’t bring myself to post it. I never posted my goals for 2019 on there because I had an attack of the self-consciousness and kept them to myself. I’m desperate for support, desperate for somebody to say something, but I can’t put myself out there. I’d be screaming into the void anyway, as I don’t think there’s a community in the world that could actually put up with me. I just want someone to tell me it’s not my fault I guess, even though I really do think it kinda is.

Anyway, things aren’t going well, things are going pretty damn awful actually and I don’t really know what to do with myself. My goals for January were:

• Word Count: 2,363/16,000 (15%)
• Chapter 11 of Painting Layers of Love
• Divided finished
• Big Bang Art finished

And you can see what happened ^^ which was not a lot basically. Those words were on Painting Layers of Love so I have half a first draft of the chapter. I guess you could argue progress was made but it’s nowhere near what I needed, and I was being super lenient with the goals in my opinion. They should have been achievable so this failure is all the worse for that.

University is going terribly. I’m not attending my lecture as I can’t cope with it, and I missed doing my first formative assignment for one of the modules. In another module I’m finding a project incredibly hard to deal with, and so I’m barely coping with that. I think #NotCoping or #BarelyCoping is kinda the theme for the month which is just pathetic.

So let’s try this again. February Goals:

• Word Count: 0/16,000
• Chapter 11 of Painting Layers of Love
• Divided finished
• An art piece finished

I’m not exactly reaching for the stars there as it’s basically the same as January but I don’t know what else to put. I have to do the January stuff, and as I didn’t do it in January it gets shifted. I just hope to merlin I put my big girl pants on and February turns out better because I can’t bear the idea of shifting the same tasks to March. I mean that completely undermines the point of a deadline. I suck so much, I really do, I’m awful and just yeah, this is hopeless really but I’m going to try.