establishing a routine

So I've moved, which is...I'm not gonna say great, because nobody thinks moving is great (except maybe professional movers, but even then I suspect they don't precisely love it). "I love packing all my worldly belongings, paying exorbitant amounts of money to move them across the country, and then unpacking them all!" said nobody, ever. But I've moved, and it's more or less done. I'm in an apartment. It has furniture in it. I'm slowly removing all the cardboard from my living spaces.

What remains, now, is establishing a routine. Namely: when am I going to start writing again? And how? My new job has a vastly different and much more irregular schedule than my old job, which makes it weirdly challenging, because my old writing schedule relied fairly heavily on my work schedule being, well, regular.

I've had two schedules in the past that worked fairly well for me, one of which was getting up early to write in the mornings before work, and another that was writing for an hour before bed. There were pros and cons to each: writing in the morning usually meant I was more "fresh" and could be quite productive, but it also meant, well, actually getting out of bed; writing in the evening was more flexible in the sense that I could get started whenever and also finish whenever, putting off bed if I really got on a roll, but sometimes I was too tired after a long day to really get much done.

But now? Now my schedule is all over the place. I had a 7:30 am meeting on Wednesday, and on Thursday I got started at noon but was at work until almost 9 pm. But I'm exhausted at the end of nearly every day, so I'm thinking this means getting up early in the morning to write. There's not gonna be that many 7:30 am meetings...hopefully. 

"i hate writing, why do i keep doing it"

I wrote to someone in an email, recently. A fellow writer, of course, because fellow writers Get It. Writing is terrible! Plotting is the worst, dialogue is the worst, characterization is the worst, and don't let me get into editing. Editing is The Actual Worst. I'm ignoring two stories that I've finished drafting because I just don't want to edit them. I'd rather write.

There's something fun that about that first draft. I love the discovery. Even when I have something more or less outlined (either on paper or in my head), there's always an element of surprise. I'm not sure non-writers get this. You're the writer; shouldn't you know what's going to happen next? But I frequently don't. I know how it begins, and I have some vague sense of what's going to happen in the middle, and I know how it's going to end. But all that in-between stuff? No clue.

Which is to say, I'm writing this blog entry instead of working on this story because I don't know what's supposed to happen in the story. I should probably figure that out.

a summer project

"I know what my summer project will be," I thought every year. "I'll make a new website, maybe using that Squarespace thing that seems to sponsor all the podcasts I listen to." And every year summer would fly by, and I would still have a terrible Wordpress website.

But finally, this year, as you can see, I finally did it. And Squarespace is not quite as easy as those ad spots made it seem, but I did figure it out, and I think this website looks...not bad!

I know that usually a new website is accompanied by new content and there, uh, isn't. But there will be. I promise. It's going to have werewolves in it. And serial killers. You like those, right?