Monday Mug 25
Hello, my writer people! I am so happy to be back. It never seems to fail that my February goes by so quickly each year. This year I lost a couple of weeks to the bitter cold, snow, and ice. There are many things to do on a farm in this type of weather and none of it in a heated area. I am sitting here with my mug of coffee because now it apparently puts me to sleep. (I never saw that one coming.) Though I think this speaks to the lack of sleep in my world lately.
Something I want to talk about tonight is the things we once used, which might work again. No, I’m not telling you to get back into that lousy relationship, so don’t go there. I am talking about planning. I’m a bit obsessed with planners and all stationary. I had using this daily planner for a couple of years now to keep my stress levels lower. When I saw a day at a time, it was wonderful because I was just focused on that day. It kept me more in my present moment.
However, I started to put some of my daily tasks off to the next day, not realizing how full the next day was. I realized this year I needed to go back to a weekly planner to make sure I wasn’t overloading myself. A planner I used to love and use often was a passion planner, but I had a couple of bad experiences. I was too picky when it came to size and bleed-through. There was nothing else on the market that would meet my needs, so I got a passion planner this year, and it was amazing! There was no bleed-through with my zebra highlighters. I absolutely love it, and I continue to feel more accomplished!
My writing is going great right now because I am taking the pressure off myself to be perfect. I have decided to come back to the art of playing with writing so my inner child can have some joy again. The scheduled I am on right now is writing every other day for 10 minutes to an hour. The writing I have been doing has been all prompt-based as of late because of the isolation I am still living in. When I was going to the office and out in society daily, many events sparked ideas for me, but I find prompts working for me now. I get these prompt through Instagram and share a lot of what I find on my page. You can find them here. I finished The Artist Way, and I felt so much better as an artist.
Writing groups I am involved in right now are Story A Day and a Patreon group for Tammy B. In both of these groups, I am learning from other writers and learning about writing in general. Tammy’s group has great education around publishing, being a writer, and fun prompts. Story A Day had conversions about what is going on in the short story world and focused on community. It is nice to be able to answer questions and to ask questions. There is so much knowledge out there, and it is nice to bounce the information off other writers. I would recommend anyone not in a writing group or who doesn’t have writing connections to reach out and find some.
The big event I am attending this month is going to the AWP Conference virtually. I was so excited about going to this event in person because it was scheduled for my state this year. However, I am even more excited about the virtual option because I won’t miss a word of what is being said. I hope you are having a great year so far, and like always, just keep writing.
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