Another smaller thing that has been pushed out of the way is writing. Don't get me wrong, I still attempt to write daily, but it is definitely lacking in its usual vigor. I did my annual 24 Hour Writing Marathon in July and discovered, much to my dismay, that I was only able to write half as much as last year before I got sick of writing. I'm supposed to be improving on my word count goals, not failing in them. My actual writing is kind of slacking. I've been doing a lot of sorting and such of my stories, cleaning out old ideas that never would've worked, and sorting the scenes in written stories to find what scenes I can or can't actually use. Turns out, I write a lot of scenes just for fun and about 45% of them don't into fit into the projected outline. That 600,000 words I wrote last year for WriYe? Yeah, less than half of them were in scenes that I'll eventually use in one of my stories.
Next year, despite college and a job, I do plan to continue with WriYe (since I took a break this year). I'm going to try for the daunting task of one million words in a year. That's only actually just under 2750 words a day, which I can easily do in an hour of steady writing. Right now, the sorting I'm doing is going to, at some point, lead to all my stories being outlined, making my writing next year be easy. I'll pick one of my many, many in progress stories and work on it until it's finished or until I get sick of it. At the moment, though, it's nearly impossible to do that because I'm just too unorganized. I've been working since June on this organizing my stories thing and I'm not even half done. I just have way too many ideas that I want to work on. The thing is, when I'm going through and sorting a particular story, I get really into it again, just like when I had the idea in the first place. I've started a writing journal with each story, where I write down notes/ideas/random thoughts that I get while working on it. Those will later be sorted out between usable and unusable ideas. If I find I can't just get into a story (which has only happened once or twice) it is booted out of my collection as a bad idea.
At the moment, I am supposed to be writing a novel for August Camp NaNoWriMo, abbreviated by me as AuCaNaNo. The novel idea is one I had only a couple days before AuCaNaNo started, and I didn't outline it a bit. I'm approximately 10,000 words in and it's the twelfth day of the month, meaning I'm about 8,000 words behind. Somehow, I keep finding ways to procrastinate, even though I really love the novel idea and I'm incredibly fond of my main character, Blaise. Though I'm more fond of his wife and daughters - Alys (pronounced 'Alice'), Cinne (pronounced 'sin-ee), Alphia (Al-fee-a), and Dana.
Beyond writing, I've been having a sudden craving to draw again. These typical turn out with me managing to draw one half-decent picture that takes about a week to do, then deciding that drawing really isn't worth all the effort it takes for me to do it (as it doesn't come naturally to me like writing does) and set my sketchbook aside until the next time the craving overtakes me. Through the skill of being able to draw relatively well would definitely help me in the character development area of writing (with character profile sketches), it isn't worth the hours I'd have to put in to learn how to do so. My hobby of writing takes up way to much of my time as it is. I don't need another time consuming hobby right now."When your hobbies get in the way of your work - that's OK; but when your hobbies get in the way of themselves...well..." ~Steve Martin
