The Writing Life
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Q&A – Writing
Thanks for all the questions y’all keep sending.  It’s awesome, and I am collecting them, I promise, I am trying to find categories to fit them into so I can hit several at one post. Do you still put your old stories (M/M, F/M) online?  Where or why not? Yeah, this is an interesting question.  My M/M stories are online on this website (not the blog part, the main part) at http://www.sanctumia.com. For some reason half the time it auto-bumps you out to a new page (discipline partnerships webring) and I’m too lazy to go in and unlink from the webring right now, so it it bumps you off the…
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Out of Place
Depression is trying to grab hold of me again today, so I’m fighting it… with all the energy that hasn’t already been sucked into depression. So… mostly I’m sitting here resisting curling up in front of the TV. Hooah! I had a pretty busy week for a summer week when I’m not working, and I think that was good for me in some ways, but it also meant I did a lot less writing than I wanted to, and that I am dragging hard today, so, you know, trying to slither out of writing today, too. So I’m fighting that urge, too.
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Impostor Syndrome
I have two people in my family who are professional artists (painters). Â One of them is… very average (she makes paintings that I could recreate, and I am absolutely not competent in visual arts). Â One of them is extremely talented (she makes paintings I couldn’t even begin to understand the skills behind and feel I am only skimming the surface with my big, clumsy, non-artist brain trying to begin to identify the technique involved in what she creates), and considers herself a skilled, successful, professional artist. The first person (average) is prolific (makes multiple paintings a day) and “successful” (sells her paintings regularly, has a large community of fans of…
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Recursive First Drafts
I know S doesn’t like the “Shitty First Drafts” idea, so this is for you, S.  🙂  I recently read an article by an author who is absolutely not on board with the whole “Shitty First Drafts” idea that is so common among authors.  It was first attributed to Hemingway who said, “The first draft of anything is shit.”  Then it was expanded by Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird where she said that the first draft is like letting a child play, it is unconstrained, just ideas flowing onto the page. Now, this other author says that this is all fine and good and that most authors agree with this particular…
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Broken Toys
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Output
I’m having a less than easy night. Â It’s not terrible – certainly not by the bar set by multiple nights this summer – but not… great. I think it’s depression, or at least the leading edge of a depression front. Sir thinks that possibly my feeling is akin to burnout (and potentially that’s enough to tip my bipolar back towards depression) because I’ve been… outputting intensely for several days and likely not getting enough inputting.
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Broken Toys
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My Writing Journal
My journal. Â Yes, it does exist, much as I some days wish it didn’t… mocking me with its presence, the guilt building the longer I put off writing. Â But I do write in it, eventually. Â Granted, the writing is often scraps, bits and pieces which may or may not ever actually end up on a story…
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Write or DIE!
I found this new (to me) writing tool that is actually giving me some hope for getting back into doing warm-ups/free writes/writing exercises. A friend of mine just introduced me to it and I have downloaded its desktop version. It is a program which times you as you write, allows you to set time and word count goals, plays a truly obnoxious alarm if you cease typing for a given number of seconds…