Cha-cha-cha-changes....

Ok, so, real talk time. I love and hate this blog. I love it because it's a way to reach out to people but I hate it because I cannot be all awesome every week. So I am making a really big change that will be up by October 1st. I am leaving Blogger and going over to a Wordpress site to have an author website. Now, this doesn't mean that the blog is going away. It just means that the blog is over there but it won't be the first thing that you see. It means you'll see a nice shiny front page and then click to go over to the blog. Or just bookmark the blog and you can go straight to it.

The big reason why I'm doing this is because I just don't have the bandwidth to update every week. I need to own that and I am doing that now. However, I still want a landing page and a blog that only gets updated once a month is not a good look. It just isn't. I need to make a change and that involves going over to a new service. I will leave up a post that says "hey, come meet me over at the website" with a link, so you won't be left hanging in a lurch.

So, that's that and we'll be over at the new page in a week. I'm going to go get stuff done now.

Motivation and What To Do When It Runs Away

Motivation is something that is supposed to come easy to writers. We're supposed to put ourselves in front of our computer, open a word document or whatever your software or choice is, and write whatever we're going to get done for the day. However, you also know, as a writer that it doesn't always happen that way. There are days or weeks or even months where you do not have anything going right with your writing. You're stalled on a scene or a chapter and there seems to be nowhere to go. You feel overwhelmed with life tasks and your writing tasks fall by the wayside. I know. I've been there. Let's go through some ways that I help myself get back on the horse.

1. Stalled on scene/chapter: Jump around! This was very hard for me to learn how to do but I'm glad I did. I am a very linear writer, wanting to write from chapter 1 to chapter 30, and I had to write in order. Writing out of order was foreign to me and felt wrong. However, you will do yourself a huge service if you start practicing writing out of order. It means that you can jump from a chapter that's giving you a hard time, go to a chapter or scene where the words flow, and come back to the chapter that's giving you a problem. Also, writing ahead might make you realize what the problem is so you can fix it and get the problem chapter written.

2. Life is overwhelming and there's no time to write. I heard you on this one. I know that a lot of the advice is to get up early and write but that doesn't work for me. I'm a night owl so I'll stay up and write to get some writing in. Or I'll overload my weekends with writing because there was just no time during the week to do so. Also, having a to-do checklist and having one of your to-dos being write x amount of words. Yes, you might push it off, which is why you should add to your word count if you do as long as it won't stress you out. If it does, then just move it and get it done when you can.

3. Your computer is just not comfortable. Oh boy, been there for that too. Right now, I'm going through that. One of the best ways to work through this is change up how you're writing. I know this might not be workable for everyone, but I have a Surface that is my writing computer that goes everywhere with me. While I do like writing on my normal laptop, I'm just not wanting to on there right now. There's no want to get my writing done on it, so I'm working on the Surface to get writing done. However, if you don't, I've got a full recommendations. Write long hand and then type it up to see where you go with it. If possible, see if you can borrow a computer or go to your local library and use one of their computers. Make sure that you save your work to a thumb drive or the cloud or even your email if you go that route. If you have a smartphone, use that with either typing into a program that will save your notes. Or talk into your smartphone! Changing up how your writing really might help.

4. Last one is what to do when all you want is to spend time on the internet. I get it, the internet is awesome and sometimes want to read Twitter or Facebook or whatever you're doing. However, it's a motivational suck because you'll spend a lot of time on it without getting writing done. There are a ton of blockers up there to block certain sites if you still need the internet to Google - I know I do - or you can just turn it off. It is so hard to turn it off so I do recommend using a blocker for the sites that you go through the most. Plus, you can just set it to a timer and at the end of the time, take a break in order to stretch.

Those are my four big ways that I get demotivated and then back into writing. Do you have any other you would like advice on or would like to give your own tips? Comment below or hit me up on Twitter. Until next time, happy writing!

Reading, Pitch Wars, and Everything In-Between

Since we've last chatted readers, a lot of things have happened. Nothing big and life changing, but little and somewhat life changing. Maybe less life changing and more of life helping? Either way, I've been up to things and thought I would pop in for an update. I am going to attempt, key word is attempt, to update this blog every week. It might just be little status messages like this, if you like those sort of things, or it might be writing advice or it might be about a book I decided to binge in the last week. Or even a TV show or a movie that I thought should be on everyone's radar. Yeah, it might not be all that interesting to read every week but I think a fuller blog is helpful.

First off, I've been reading a lot. I've upped my reading goal from 24 to 30 to now 50. I'm six books ahead of schedule to hit 50 by the end of the year and there's two readathons coming up. There's the Creating & Co RIP (read in peace) and then ebookathon that starts right after that. As for past readathons, I did the NEWTs readathon because I'm a geek and love all things Harry Potter. It's similar to the OWLs one I talked about in April, but you could only do the subjects you passed during the OWLs. So I had five subjects to read, with only finishing one up all three levels (Acceptable, Exceeds Expectations, and Outstanding), but I read 9 books in the month of August. That's a new personal best so I'm happy about it. As for books that you should stop reading this and just go get a copy of are Rules of Magic by Alice Hoffman and Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty. The first one is a prequel to Practical Magic and I loved it. Devoured it in a few days and fell in love with the Aunts all over again. Not sure about Vincent, even all these weeks after I'm done with it, so go read it and tell me what you think. For the second, also a binge read of 3 days, and it was just so nice and refreshing a read. It was a mystery wrapped around this Real Housewives (season 1 NYC) vibe that I was just digging and couldn't put it down. I felt the emotions of so many of the characters on so many levels and that was a very nice connection.

My September reading plans are to just read what I feel like reading. At the moment, it's a lot of adult because I'm feeling burnt out on YA. I'm currently reading Daughters of the Night Sky, which is about the 588th Night Bomber Regiment that's entirely of women called the Night Witches, and I'm kind of liking it. I'm only 18% done and I want to give it a bit more to settle in before I DNF or put it aside for a while. I also want to finish My Lady Jane which is historical fantasy riff on Lady Jane Gray's life. It is so good but I put it aside for NEWTs. Going to pick it back up again to finish so I can read My Plain Jane (Jane Eyre retelling) for an October spooky read.

On the writing front, it's going slowly but steady. I'm querying Mystery of the Dark as often as I can, along with submitting it to Pitch Wars, so we'll see what happens. I'm having a lot of fun connecting with the greater writer community on Twitter and Facebook so that feels like the bigger win to me. On the non-querying front, I'm working on Lady of Arrows, which is a Robin Hood retelling, as well as Of the Sky, which might turn into a romance with fantasy elements instead of the other way around. Oops. It's a standalone, which is amazing because I never really write those, so this is a very nice change of pace from what I'm used to. Seriously - Mystery of the Dark is 6 or 7 books, Lady of Arrows is a duology, Hidden Scions is going to be a trilogy at least, and Watchers, if I ever get to it, is like 12 books. Easily. I think I'm going to try and have more standalones, if I'm able to. It's a lot more with just deciding it and letting the book figure out what it's going to be.

That's pretty much it. I'm always over on Twitter in case you want to interact with me and I hope everyone has a great week. Until next time, take care and happy writing!