Life is the true test.

Every day we go through our daily tumult’s. They drive us crazy as we feel manipulated by something we don’t see and possibly never will.

The friction of what we find within the strangeness and cavorting in the space of a day enlightens us and makes us new but there is also the other things.

We find them when we’re trapped in our own mind. Searching for the words, the way, and the exit from our current headspace.

Once we’ve reached or more appropriately, attained, the required ability we forget who we once were, or at least we should.

The trouble with entering a new dream of vision of who we want to be is the leftovers.

Those we’ve left behind in the shadows of the life we once lived.

It’s a strange and ill begotten thing to trivialize such a thing but we must do it in order to reach the necessary plane of existence our mind, and more necessarily, our soul.

These are not the same things and within the world we travel we must learn to absorb and realize our path is treacherous and because of that we must be the person we’ve needed to be, not for anyone but ourselves.

2020 and doing the hard things.

This last year I pushed through a few issues.

I found my writing groove and I was distracted at times by video games.

But I didn’t do the hard things.

I didn’t publish because I was undecided and nervous about the quality of the book I planned on putting out.

I made a promise to myself I wouldn’t do that. I did it anyway.

I also had a few personal victories.

I pushed past the things I felt comfortable writing and wrote some truly freaky shit.

I sent out more queries than I ever have and I plan on doing the same in 2020.

I decided my writing and my time to write is worthy and needs devotion.

In 2020 I’ll make priorities for that time and not let others take it from me. My writing and editing time is me working even if I’m not currently published.

That will change and the mindset I have going into the new year changes too.

I will not be held back by things or people.

I will move forward, ignore and resist what others think of me and will never let people in who don’t understand those things.

I fought with a few demons, found a couple more and I’ll kill every last one of ’em until I’m where I believe I should be.

Go out and get it and take no prisoners.

I wrote 86k last December. Here’s what happened and why I won’t do that again.

Yes, you read the title of this post correctly.

I finished a 86,000 word novel in one month. But here’s the catch, it wasn’t executed very well.

I know I need to go back to it but damn, it’s a daunting as hell task.

It’s not quite cohesive and that’s where the problem is the biggest. The smaller ones are it feels like a few short stories compiled into a novel.

I had no idea what I was writing at the time. I only had a first line and went from there.

This month I plan on writing a lot but not 86k, but we’ll see.

I had an idea the other day about a story, actually a few stories with one character that holds them together.

I’ve taken to sketching, connecting, outlining and figuring out what the hell its about.

It may take me a few months to do this as I’ve allotted a great deal of 2020 with construction of this one.

I did this with a couple of stories and I really enjoyed writing them and their respective outlines.

This one though, it’s different.

You know that excitement when things click? The feeling of trying to catch your breath with the possibilities?

That’s what I feel with this one and it’s why I’ll be taking so much of the year working on it.

I will also be submitting short stories and novels to magazines, contests, and agents.

I had planned on doing that today but had a bartending event to prepare for.

I’ll be submitting a novel to agents over the next couple of days as well as preparing a couple of short stories to those magazines and contests.

Have a good week and keep writing.

Depression and fighting to be myself.

So I’ve been depressed. You may have noticed.

It’s permeated the blog my personal life and my writing.

It started after I had too much to drink in front of my kids and got sick, so since June.

I don’t usually drink to excess like that and it freaked me out. I stopped for almost 3 months.

Wednesday night I had a drink and it felt good to have it and not care who’s going to judge me for it, I’m at the point I don’t care.

What I have done is make up rules for when I drink.

I can’t have a shot because I’m stressed. I have to deal with my shit and what’s causing me stress.

I can’t use it as medication. Which means when I’m at a family function, I won’t be drinking.

In the past, as I mentioned last week, I’ve done this. I’d drink so I could ignore how people have treated me in the past.

Now I won’t drink or I won’t attend those events.

My wife said it was okay that I wanted to drink and it’s not like I drink to get hammered.

That night in June I drank so I could deal with shit. I had people at that event that I’d either not talk to or that if I said what I really wanted too it wouldn’t go over well.

So, since that event, I’ve barely been writing. It’s not that the alcohol fueled my writing it was that my mind wasn’t there.

I was constantly worrying about drinking and how people would look at me if I went back to it.

After discussing this with my wife she said, “Don’t worry what others think. It’s more important what you think.” And that’s why I’ve been married to this amazing woman for 20 years.

She knows me better than I know myself. She understands me.

She gets it!

Since I accepted that it’s more important what I think, I’ve wrote 6,000 words in two days.

Accepting yourself for who you are, not who others want you to be for their convenience, is a breakthrough for me.

I’m having a better week and I hope you are too.

We have to change our lives for ourselves.

I’ve thought a lot about where I’m going in the last couple of weeks.

It’s brought me to realize I’m not working on me as much as I should.

Sure, I write something new all of the time but I don’t work on what I’ve written.

Last week I talked about characters and how important they are.

I still believe that but things change.

I have a lot of stories that need work. They need their characters developed further.

I’ve always believed in having a goal for the summer.

Whether it was spending time with my cousin as a kid, with my kids now, or figuring out that what I’ve written is a good start, it just needs work.

What I’ve written is good enough for now.

I’ve thought I needed something new to keep me fresh and keep writing, but I have a lot of good stories they only need fixing.

My goal by the end of the year is to have most of them ready or submitted to agents or magazines.

Until the end of the year I’ll be focusing on improving all of them.

It will be difficult to ignore that little voice in my head telling me to write something new but writing isn’t always about that something new.

It’s about editing, revising and I’ve ignored that aspect of my writing for too long.

It’s time to work.