So, June was a strange time for writing. I wrote very little until the end, needless to say that I didn’t finish my Focus Project. Because of how inconsistent I’ve been with my Focus Projects, I’m going to stretch them into two month projects and not make a ‘decision’ until I start writing in the new month. It’s easy to say I’m going to write ‘this’ but when I actually get there, all I want to do is write ‘that’.

This month is going to be about re-assessing what I have in depth. I’ve already re-sorted and categorised my works and now I want to look at them in more depth and probably establish files or notebooks and start managing my notes, hoping to grease my gears at the same time. I’ll be looking at changing or improving plots and research that pieces might need as well as assessing works for anything that ‘I wrote then but wouldn’t write now’.

It’s cold down in my den, but I love it. I love the cold and dim-light weather. What a lot of people find ‘gloomy’, I find thrilling, and so I’m hoping to get a lot of work out in these next few weeks.

July Goals

I made more progress in my last monthly goals than I thought I would but probably didn’t make as much as I wanted to. This month is going to be about taking it slow and finding my rhythm again. i’m going to be looking more at writing work than trying to force myself to spit out thousands of words a week, in hopes that I’ll find what it is I want to write and then just run with it. June was taken over by The Tales of Mylvetta and so I will continue to work on that for now. The idea is that it’s going to be a series of short story tales so I don’t know when/if I expect it to be finished.

• Write What I Want

This month I just want to write what comes to me. The tap has just been dripping but I want to let it run as much as it wants, even if that means I don’t have incredible focus and I end up with another dozen projects. I don’t want to have to many open-ended things like I used to but I also don’t want to stifle myself.

• Write What I Wanted To

I have a couple of projects that I want to work on but because they’re of serious non-fiction nature, I haven’t been sure where/how to start. I want to at least get started on those this month, even if that means just doing research into how to get them going. This also ties into one of my June Goals, which was to write more diversely. I spend so much time thinking about things to write and not writing them. I think it’s because I don’t have the same confidence or ‘safety net’ with non-fiction as I do with fiction. I know that I’ve written a lot of fiction that people have liked, but I’ve never had someone say “that was a good essay/article” and so I don’t know if I’m doing it correctly. I think it’s also that non-fiction, in my position where I have a teeny tiny platform, just isn’t going to really have anyone commenting on it because they’re not published works or journal articles. Which I don’t mind because that’s the reality of it. At uni, I get small portions of feedback, so even though I’ve done well on my essays, I’m not sure that I have the confidence in replicating that.

If any of that makes sense.

• Writing Prompts

I feel like I’ve been on a good roll of actually doing some prompt writing but two days in a row isn’t an incredible feat. This month, I want to do them daily (or almost daily). I don’t think I’ll be able to keep it up as much as I would like to but I’m going to try.

• Blog Better

I want to pay more attention to this blog and my public development as a writer. I want to also actually put more writing on here. I realised that recently it’s much more blog than portfolio and I need to fix that, even if it’s just tidbits of what I’m currently writing. To do this I need to get over the anxiety of what happens to my writing when I put it up in a public space. I want to create actual content for this blog rather than just my thoughts about my writing.

• Edit Better

I did some editing in June but is was strangely lacklustre. I don’t know if I was just tired of doing critiquing/editing or if I just don’t edit nearly as well on the computer as I do on paper but this month I want to be editing much better than I have been. It feels like I’m just copy-editing rather than doing complete editing work. Although, this might not be bad either. I might experiment with it.

Here’s hoping this month is better than the last!

I wish I had a place like this to write. Out in the beautiful rural area of Teven… that’s where I always wanted a writing cottage.