Ebbs

I barely wrote anything this past week. Less than 600 words total across 2 days in Obscure Origin. Part of this is because I was busy dealing with website issues. I did some writing in other stories on two extra days. But these are ideas I have way down in the pipeline (not before 2021, maybe not even until 2022 given my current writing pace), so I felt like I was “wasting time” even though writing scenes that I’ve been dreaming about is never a waste. Those non-Obscure Origin scenes were a total of about 700 words. In other words, a little over 1.3k over 4 days of writing. A much lower output than April (not surprising given there’s no Camp NaNo event to keep me accountable on a regular basis). The rest of the week was devoted to doing research on multiple forms of outlining (something I almost always do for a story and then inevitably abandon and need to rewrite—which also makes me wonder why I bother).

And while I felt guilty for not writing (something that’s better articulated by an old Kate Cavanaugh video), I ultimately came to accept that my brain needed a break after going hard since January when my last Spring semester of undergraduate started (and then COVID-19 stress, April’s Camp NaNo, and the murder of George Floyd).

Black Lives Matter, by the way. And I don’t want to hear “All Lives Matter,” because the first doesn’t invalidate the latter, but the latter invalidates the point of the first. BLM is a reminder to a country built on freedom that there is a huge demographic that doesn’t live that reality due to systematic racism and oppression (not just police brutality—though that is obviously a huge threat to Black people in America).

With all the craziness happening, I needed a break. But now that I’ve essentially taken the week off, I’m hoping I’ll write more next week because it is the month before the next Camp NaNo—and therefore should be used for prepping. But I’m still writing Obscure Origin, so I might not get around to planning the sequel but I hope to finish the first draft of this current story.

Lastly, Obscure Origin is being featured with a lot of other SciFi and Fantasy novels associated with a giveaway for a Kindle Oasis, so don’t forget to enter!