IWSG: Writer’s Update

Purpose: To share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a safe haven for insecure writers of all kinds!

Posting: The first Wednesday of every month is officially Insecure Writer’s Support Group day. Post your thoughts on your own blog. Talk about your doubts and the fears you have conquered. Discuss your struggles and triumphs. Offer a word of encouragement for others who are struggling. Visit others in the group and connect with your fellow writer - aim for a dozen new people each time - and return comments. This group is all about connecting! Be sure to link to this page and display the badge in your post. And please be sure your avatar links back to your blog! If it links to Google+, be sure to change it as Google+ is going away in January. Otherwise, when you leave a comment, people can't find you to comment back.

Let’s rock the neurotic writing world!

Our Twitter handle is @TheIWSG and hashtag is #IWSG.   
The next posting day is August 5th. 
Sign up here.

 

The awesome co-hosts for the August 5 posting of the IWSG are Susan Baury Rouchard, Nancy Gideon, Jennifer Lane, Jennifer Hawes, Chemist Ken, and Chrys Fey!

My update:

It’s hard to believe it’s been 3 months, during which I have managed to write 3 not-very-good short stories—and about 12,000 words for my eyes only. It helped a little in my fear that I’m not a writer anymore, when I realized just how much journaling I had actually done!

Where things stand now as a writer: I wrote and on Friday will share on my blog another silly SF story about my favorite hapless, er, intrepid space explorer, Xavier Xanthum. I produced a very poor draft of a story for the IWSG Anthology, which I have some rather small hopes of being able to spiff up enough to submit in time. I have also resumed edits on my new Pismawallops PTA novel, and am finding that going much better than expected. I've regained enough focus to work for 45 minutes or an hour, and the editing at the front end of the novel is pretty simple, so it's soothing.  I have also worked on an exercise to try to write a character who accepts her feelings, rather than trying to hide/deny them as most of my main characters do. That one isn’t producing any kind of story, but it is good writing practice.

That leads me to a question I asked a couple of weeks ago about fictional characters who are good with feelings, and that’s sent me to start re-reading Jane Austin, but I also realized as I was relaxing with a new mystery that Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisy Dobbs is someone who is very much in tune with feelings, her own and others’. While she may not always show them, she at least doesn’t deny them to herself, which may be what we are really looking for. It’s not that one—or one’s character—needs to wear her heart on her sleeve, but that feelings should be acknowledged and accepted, not condemned as a weakness. I'm reading through The Emotion Thesaurus, and giving some thought to how my characters express emotion--and how they reveal it when not speaking of it, too.

That brings me to Chrys Fey's new book, Keep Writing With Fey. It's blog hop day for the book as well as the IWSG, and since the hop is about dealing with depression, burnout, or writer's block, my update is right on topic! I've been reading at this book, too, and considering what might help me from Chrys's many smart and thoughtful suggestions. So far, the big one for me is to do *something* every day--and celebrate having done so!

Hop around to get inspiration from the other writers participating in the hop, as well as to the other IWSG bloggers!

I’ll take a pass on this month’s optional question, but feel free to leave comments about genre or about your own struggles with writer's block, depression, grief, or anything else that you want to talk about.

Oh, and I'm out of the mountains, home for a couple of weeks. So here's a random pretty picture: