Hi friends! Happy (very early) Sunday! I hope you enjoyed your week, are able to rest this Sunday, and are looking forward to the start of the new week.
This week was sort of a game-changer for me. I’ve written on here before, and discussed with some of you personally, what it’s like being a writer while also working, while also being a mom, while also being pregnant for a second time… The list of “while…” clauses could go on and on, as I’m sure they do for many of you reading this.
But this week—and I’m giving a LOT of the credit over to the planner that I use—I was able to see how all the pieces could fit together, if I worked really hard to get through my to-do list, cut out the reasons to skip writing for the day, not hit the snooze button—again, I’m sure you can follow me and also do / have done some of these things that limit your ability to write. All of that being said, I wrote everything down that I ideally wanted to do, and only those things, and I was able to see where I had time to actually complete all of those things.
And I did. I got all of that writing time in that I wanted to. I literally feel like that stereotypical chick writing in a field (except I’m writing at a desk or on a couch, often with coffee, at all late hours and early hours that I can—but it’s still really freeing. Read that and weep if you want.).
What that means for the lovely people who are also the ones who follow this blog, is that I’ll more often have publications to list from now on. I joined a few freelance writing teams that I admire and am now writing for, I’m getting back into regular book-reviewing, I’m making time to write at least one poem per day, and I’m aiming to write 500 words per day toward a novel through the end of the year (which would approximately equal the length of a novel AND many of its edits).
But—I’m not going to bore you or bog you down with a post every time one of these pieces goes live. Rather, at the end of each week, I’ll do a round-up of all the freelance pieces that went live, and probably an opening snippet about how the writing process is going (much like the one I’m writing and you’re reading right now, though much, much shorter). Poems will be the exception, because there’s no “weekly” guarantee of them being published, and I also want to create an extra tunnel through which you can find and read these publications, because they are small, literary, and awesome (whether or not they publish my work!) and should get appropriate attention for that.
And—I would say that’s enough rambling from me for now. Thanks for reading this far; I hope you’ll keep coming back to see what’s going on in my writing life. Here’s this week’s round-up:
Wednesday: “What Coming in 2nd Means to Croatia: The Wild and Heart-Warming Receipt of Their Finals-Placing Team Said More about Croatian Heart than Winning Ever Could.,” on Medium. For those of you who know my story with my husband, he was born and raised in Croatia, and he lived in Europe until he was twenty, well after the war had ended. During my visits to his home, it always strikes me the heart of Croatia’s people and the country as a whole. This was meant to be a sports-related piece, and it is, but it amounted to much more about a culture that many U.S. Americans are only beginning to learn about.
Thursday: “How to Include SEO While Keeping Your Writer’s Brain Happy: Avoid ‘Dumbing Down’ Your Writing Style While Accommodating SEO,” on Initium: How Writerpreneurs Think! via Medium. I’ve just joined an excellent team of writers that focuses on various business aspects, and I’ll be producing pieces that largely focus on different areas of freelance writing and marketing. This is a straight-forward piece about what SEO is, how it can be difficult to utilize for a more independent or creative writer, and how to maintain your personal flare while employing SEO.
Saturday: “Watch Shark Week for Fun. Do These Five Things to Make a Difference,” on Medium. This is a brief, introductory-style piece on Shark Week, and what you should read, watch, and do, to supplement (or replace) your annual binge-watch. This was a fun piece to write that digs down into my interests in the horror genre a little bit, while also emphasizing the important role that environmental awareness (and love) takes up in my life.
And that’s it for this week! I hope you enjoyed these, and thanks for the read. In case you’re still reading, I’ll be starting week-long series topics this very next week (this first one focusing on keeping creativity alive in artistic, parenting homes), so if there is a topic you’d like to see covered, I’d love to hear! Happy Sunday, and good night, all!