Monday, December 5, 2011

THE TROUBLE WITH DEVELOPING A WRITING ROUTINE

Hello All!!!
So, today I woke up for the third Monday in a row for my 5:20 am workout. I groaned at the early hour that my alarm had the nerve to go off at, mumbled as I got dressed for the grueling pain I was about to put myself in, and moaned as I made my way through the first minutes of the work. I spend my early mornings on Mondays and Tuesdays with good old Jillian Michaels, and that woman kicks your butt for real! So when my alarm goes off and I anticipate the world of hurt I'm about to go through, I think of going back to sleep...every single time! This thought today made me think on how difficult it is to establish good routines in everything we do...especially in writing.

Getting that much needed and desired writing routine can be so difficult. Ask anyone, getting yourself to sit down for a specified amount of time every day can be such a pain once you've had other things come into the mix and mess with your established schedule. For me, moving to New York, moving back to Houston, dealing with a period of sadness (ie: can't write cause I'm too upset), then finding a new job completely messed up my good old, tried and true schedule. Now I'm working to get that new routine in gear.

It's taking a lot of trying new things and throwing them out once I find that they don't work to find my new process, but I feel sure that I'll find it soon. And the benefits of all of this searching and trying new things will definitely come in time.

What processes to you all work with? How long did it take you to find a routine after a drastic change?

Happy Writing!!!

Thursday, December 1, 2011

USING OLD, INTENSE EMOTIONS

Hey Everybody!!!
So, I've been out of the game for a while, but that's mostly due to me having to get my life back together. After a rough year, I've finally found a good and stable job that's fairly stress free, have a good man who appreciates me, and more room in my head to think of the awesomeness that is writing and creating =). I'm still working on getting my writing groove/schedule back, but I figured that will all come in due time, so without further adieu...

Yesterday some idiot in Africa hacked into my Facebook account. It didn't cause me too much strain, but it did make me have to go and change a lot of my passwords to protect my private, for lack of a better word, stuff. I was going through one of my old bank accounts and realized how drastic of a shift in pay I'd taken since my little...let's call it a journey...to New York and back. And it made me a little angry. Who am I kidding, I was peeved! And I mean seriously seething. With one motion I was reminded of everything I gave up and sacrificed, and of all the emotions that came with it. But instead of letting myself get caught up in the wave of it, I decided to note it, to jot down the physical and emotional effects of what I'd felt, and use it at a later date.

When it comes down to it, crap happens in life that you can't plan for. All you can do is learn from your experiences and move on. Me, I plan on using these events to make my characters more real and life-like, because that's part of my job as a writer. I'm not only supposed to come up with interesting story lines and plots that keep a reader on their seat, but characters that feel and react in a way that the reader can truly relate to. And that is how I plan on turning the proverbial lemon into lemonade!!!

How do you all turn your bad situations into writing gold?