What do you want to achieve this year as a writer and how’s it going?
I’m writing a drabble a day and posting them online. I’m editing a short story and want to send it off to some magazines. And I’m reading way more than usual!
My writing resolution was to simply put less pressure on myself to write “a thing” and to spend more time just writing. So far it is going well. Whether I want to write something that is only 3 paragraphs or 30 pages, I’m giving myself that freedom.
I wrote a cyber-punk short that ended up only being a few pages with a time-skip in the middle because I couldn’t figure out how write the middle part. Then I decided “it’s cyber-punk, everyone knows how the middle goes” and wrote the last bits instead. Not something that would be published but always trying to write something that would be publish-able is what stopped me from writing in the first place.
I want to make appreciable progress in spite of the sometimes overwhelming feeling of imposter syndrome. Some days I’m happy with what I’m putting down but other days I’m Donnie hearing Walter telling me how out of my element I am and it’s a fight to keep from deleting what I’ve eked out. Those days, a series of notes for what to write on a better day looks like success; I want to believe others got through that struggle and that I will too.
On the bright side, I’ve been making my way through the latest round of research papers and technical documents I’m using as references.