Down the Rabbit Hole

Happy Monday!  Wow I feel like November has gone by so quickly and tomorrow will be December! What even happened?? I can't believe it, but am also so ready for it. My classes end in a few weeks and, even though I've been enjoying them, I'm ready for a break.  November Writing: In other words, a Nanowrimo wrap up. Nanowrimo went... differently than my other five years of doing it. I decided to do Nanowrimo for an Arthurian Legends retelling/continuation called Valiant about the daughter of Merlin. It's a cool concept and I fell in love with the aesthetic and idea of it but in practice? Let's just say it all sort of fell apart. I still managed to get to 50,000 words in it, but I didn't finish it and it was a real drag getting to 50K. Not the Nanowrimo I had wanted to have this November, but oh wells! It was a learning experience and I know I needed to write Valiant even though it didn't work out. Some story seeds that didn't quite seem to fit in Valiant h...

  Happy Wednesday! Giving thanks is my favorite form of worship. Years ago, I was taking this class on the enneagram at the church we were currently going to, and the speaker was talking about Fours (I am, of course, a Four). If you don't know what the enneagram is it's an in-depth and super accurate personality test. It's uncanny how much the enneagram gets me as a Four. But anyways, during the class there was a list of key spiritual disciplines for each type to practice or would benefit from. At the top of the Four list was gratitude. I thought that was funny and very accurate because I had been practicing gratitude for years before that. I can't remember a time when I didn't start ever single prayer I pray with thanking God for the day. Every morning when I pray, I always start out by thanking Him for the day. I'm not sure what first caused me to put such an emphasis on thankfulness in my prayers, but when I think back on it I do know there was either a ser...

Happy Wednesday everyone! I know I said this in my last post, but it's been hard to be thankful this year. I feel like I was doing Okay, I was getting to a better place and finding things to be so grateful for, keeping a good perspective when last Wednesday I felt like it was just a constant stream of bad news. For one Ticketmaster announced that if you don't have a vaccine or get tested for Covid 24-48 hours prior to a concert, you will not be allowed in. They have this whole health app set up and everything. Then our local governor (who had promised everyone before the election that there would not be another shut down, we would stay at stage 5 and everything) got rid of stages all together and has decided to keep the mask mandate, limit social gatherings again and pretty much just make life hard for people. It's all very discouraging and worries me. This post isn't about that, though. It's about thankfulness. I say all that to say though that when I found out abo...

Happy Wednesday!  Grace Anne who is behind the Totally Graced blog and the Tuesday Letters does this thing every November called Thankfulness Thursday and I've decided that for the rest of November, my blog posts are going to be about thankfulness. The weekend felt a little strange. I felt like I was living in an upside down, absurd world. There were a lot of emotions that bubbled up, the biggest one being frustration. The whole situation over the weekend was - and still is a little - frustrating.  I was going to type up a whole post about it on here, but I realized there's no point in feeding into my frustration or giving this situation more attention than it already is. Spiritual warfare is real and I think we should be praying more than ever before. I'm a little concerned about what next year - the next four years - will hold if the projection from this election holds true. But I went into November wanting it to be a good month. A month where I can sit and write Nanowrim...

Happy Tuesday everyone!  Another Tip Tuesday for you all!  Today I want to talk about how to find your niche. Finding your niche feels almost as Pidgeon-holing (is that a word??) as an ideal reader. Kind of another way to fit yourself into a little, confining box that feels claustrophobic.  But I'm here to tell you it is anything but confining and boxy. Finding my niche has actually been super freeing and amazing for me. I started my journey of narrowing my niche down at the beginning of 2019 when I took Katie Phillip's Five Day Author Challenge. For a whole day we focused on finding that one genre we could write our whole lives and never grow tired of it. "That's not possible! I would get bored of writing in the same genre my whole life!" you shout. I thought that too at first.  This is the girl who's debut is a YA sci-fi superhero book, who's written steampunk, high fantasy and even tried my hand at gold old alien sci-fi (none of them published, besides ...

  Happy Wednesday! I feel like this is the climax of 2020. Our story this year has been full of lots of ups and downs, trials and obstacles and now we're here... the big finale! I'm equal parts excited and anxious to be here. Excited because I don't know about you, but I've gotten really tired of all the political talk. Politics are important to talk about... but not all the time and not when you're using your political opinions to spread hate and discord, which unfortunately, is all most people are doing. It's just gotten really exhausting for me. It hurts my heart and fills me with more than a little bit of frustration and annoyance. It's so tiring to go on social media and see so much pain and hate and division, and it's even more tiring the fact that no one can seem to have a conversation without bringing up something heavy. I had a dentist appointment yesterday and then right after my mom and I with my little brothers in the backseat went on a...

Happy Tuesday!  We're officially three days into Nanowrimo, so I thought I'd share a few tips (specifically for the pantsers out there). This is my sixth Nanowrimo and I've won them all, so I thought maybe I have some wisdom to share? Honestly, I'm not sure how I've won six Nanowrimos other than out of shear force of will. The thought of not getting to 50,000 words at the end of the month after committing to it kills me, so I always push through even when it's hard.  But let's start with this first: If you don't know, there are three types of writers. Pantsers, plantsers and plotters. Pantsers are those of us who write by the seat of our pants. We jump in and just let the story happen without really planning or plotting anything out. The story takes us where it wants. Plotters are the opposite. They plan out everything before they write a single word of their WIP. Some plotters are meticulous and others have loose plans and worldbuilding notes and all th...