Word Charts, Rituals, and the Mixed Bag of May

Good Afternoon, World 🙂

I hope you’ve been awesome. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Let’s have a coffee!

May got off on the wrong foot for me, and for a very stupid reason.

I mean fuck, I had just finished the rough draft of my book, and landed an awesome, long-term writing job that allows me to quit Fiverr for good! Pretty damn sweet if you ask me! How exactly is that getting off on the wrong foot?

Well, you see…

I have a ritual.

And my ritual got fucked up.

At the beginning of every month, I print out my word chart, draw on it, and paste it on my bookcase next to my bed.

It’s the first thing that I see every morning. When my alarm goes off at 4:30am, and I roll over like the groggy, incoherent shit that I am, I gaze at the recorded progress of each of my efforts moving me along like a majestic wave onto the finish line…  Or trailing my ass with a reminder that I’d better get to work, because a pack of zeroes is chomping at my heels. As you can see from my reveille column, I haven’t been great about early rising this month.

Anyway, this chart is damn important.

It gives me something to strive toward, and to stay away from.

But as important as this chart may be, I still forget to fill it in time and time again. I began doodling on it as a way to make myself enjoy looking at it, because hey, if this fucker’s going to overlook my bed, I want to enjoy putting my eyes on it. A little beauty goes a long way.

Making my charts into art projects became really important to my process. They became a representation of what I wanted to make happen over this next 30-day span, an embodiment of my hopes and anxieties. Jagged strokes and splashes of highlighters, intentions… Whatever was brewing inside and needed to come out.

And this month, when I sat down to draw my little word chart,

well,

It sucked.

Take a look at this:

I hate this drawing. It makes me sad. I wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing, and every attempt I made to salvage it failed. Every time I looked at this picture, I was reminded of just how much I had failed to decorate my May Word Count Log with the attention it deserves, and I started falling behind in my log. That’s ok, right? I was working on a freelance editing project most of the time anyway, so a lot of those days were zeroes anyway, right? Great job, now you suck at art AND charting! >.<;;

But… then I realized something.

Instead of just slogging forward without tracking my progress, inevitably stumbling as I sink back into the quicksand of running my business, raising a toddler, and by god trying to write the next book in this series, I came to an epiphany:

I can just print out another chart.

So this morning, that’s what I did.

Behold:

My heart feels fine now. I feel relieved to look at my chart. I can’t wait to reclaim this month in the name of creating a prosperous, happy life for my family, and maybe even for myself too, because I am convinced, like a madman, that writing and creating are the things that I must do to survive.

Baby’s asleep, so I’ve gotta go workout. Catch you guys later. It was good seeing you again!

xoxo Liv

Book News

 

I’m so excited that after five months, I can finally say this: I finished my first draft of the first book of my miniseries trilogy “The Wolves Beneath Paris!” It’s rough, it’s messy, and by god shit gets real, but it also fucking exists as a 30k document to be hammered away upon. Objective secured.

So now, here’s the fun part. And by fun, I mean the part that usually stops me in my tracks and makes me drop projects like a little bitch and run away.

I get to go back through this first draft, outline what I actually wrote, and piece together a way together a narrative that is badass, interesting, or at the very least competent. Aim for the third, brush up on the second, and slug it out for the first, eh? One might call this the revisions process, which is a beautiful way of describing this margarita of salty self-doubt with a squeeze of OH MY GOD THIS SUCKS, but GOOD, baby. Good. I thrive on pain. Let’s keep rolling.

Ok seriously, now catch you later, peace.

xoxo Liv