Positivity Is A Choice

Now that the rush of the holidays is over (and far behind me) and I have successfully began the new year - the gloriously freezing 2014! - I have come to a realization. There is an awful lot of negativity floating around in various areas, especially when it comes to writing and independently publishing. Reading too much about how impossible the odds are that anyone will want to read your work is always a disheartening activity, and I found myself getting down as I watched numbers and felt crushed under the weight of producing another manuscript. (Keep in mind that most of us are doing this on our free time, and the constant advice to produce! produce! produce! is not always realistic or helpful.) What am I to do when all the signs say that writing and publishing is a meaningless task?

I say remain positive. If you believe in yourself and your writing, the readers will follow. Mine have been a slow trickle, but I only have one full-length novel out, and I am generally getting more eyes on my how-to book than my fiction. Perhaps as I strive to change up genres a bit I will attract more eyes on other things. Positivity is not something that just comes naturally. It is something that we must work at and practice, even when the odds seem to be against us. Besides, even if it doesn't seem to help right away, it is something that we can control, and it will hopefully give us the courage to continue sitting at that chair and pounding away at our keyboards! Who's with me?

(Cue crickets)

Fight The Fear

I've recently come down with a case of ending-terror, or what is basically the fear of writing the finale to my work in progress. I don't know where it comes from, but I do know when it starts - always when I slow down long enough to actually think of what I am writing. This happened after NaNoWriMo when I had just a handful of chapters left to write for my rough draft, and then took a small break where my brain had a chance to tell me lies about how much pressure there is.

In reality, there is no pressure, other than the pressure that I'm placing upon myself. I've received both good and bad feedback on my first published novel, and now I need to do the same process again. There is a deadline. I'd like to be done by the end of January. But, this fear in my head needs to go. Do you struggle with this fear of completing your art?

For now, I'm just going to plow ahead and hype myself up until I reach the end. I know how it's going to end. I know how things play out. I just need to put them onto the page. Ready? Here we go!

World Building

As I start to explore a few different ideas I have, I come now to the part of the creative writing process where research is essential and world building becomes the foundation of everything else I will write moving forward. A lot of people I've read say that it is easy to get tired of the world you start creating when it comes to fantasy, but I look at it more as a challenge and a framework that the rest of my narrative will hang from so that it doesn't just come crashing down when I reach something that I don't know how to explain.

My process of world building so far has been to look at how things work in our own world and then tweak them to fit my own. I've started a map of the two continents I am creating with names of towns and bodies of water, and then filling in information about all the cultures and peoples that will live in these areas.

I am also making profiles for all of my main players, which I haven't done so far in my writing journey, but decided that this time I would give it a try. So, I'm creating a binder of sorts and filling in all the information I might need for these characters - including pictures of people who are inspiration, etc. It's pretty fun!

So, if I am not updating on here, you know where I am - either work, or working on something that will hopefully end up being an epic novel before the summer. There's another few things in the works, and I will have to start organizing my time more wisely now that I've had a break from the writing marathon. Lots of creative muscles are being stretched in the evenings!