Writing Journal, 3.24.2019: In a rut and planning to write my way out of it

So, I’m not feeling too good about the week that I’ve had, writing-wise. It’s not the worst I’ve had in a statistical sense, but it’s not great, either.

+742 words written.

Days writing: 1 of 7.

Days revising: 4 of 7 for 120 total minutes.

Daily Writing Goals Met (500+ words or 30 minutes of revisions): 4 of 7 days.

There might be a few extra words not counted there from as a result of some revising (only from totally new wording and scenes) and some rough draft poems that I have written down on paper but not yet transferred to electronic storage.

I have to say that part of my lack of recent success (or relative lack of success) has been my focus during the weekends. I think there might be a way to focus on this in a way that reduces the number of distractions on those weekends where I let my mind drift rather than let it get out and play among the characters and scenes that I’m creating.

Somehow, I keep forgetting that writing can be just as much of an escape than all of the other stuff. I should say sorry for being a bit vague; I want to avoid getting too much into my personal life in these pages. What I will say, however, is that I think it is always valuable to take stock of yourself, and your behaviors, especially those that take place during your leisure time. There are many of those sorts of behaviors that can be a net positive for yourself, either creatively or in adding to your general physical or mental health. There’s also those behaviors that allow you to turn off your mind, allow yourself to just idle physically, mentally, or otherwise. I need to work, as always, at increasing the former kind of activity and reducing the latter. I hope to have better success at that.

On a tangent unrelated to that but related to my journal, I’m wondering if I also need to take some other activities into account. When I write down poems that I’ve written down on paper, shouldn’t that count as revising time? Oftentimes, I don’t write it down exactly the way I wrote it down on the paper, so isn’t that a revision? If I’m beta-reading someone else’s work, wouldn’t that also count as revising time? (Any readers who want to comment or message me with their thoughts, please feel free to do so.)

Here’s the update on my projects:

• Project A: I’ve begun researching Writer’s Market and a couple of other possibilities. Current consensus seems to be that the cost of Writer’s Market is worth it, although there are some other possibilities. I’ll continue that soon.
  Not much tinkering with the project itself, although I am wondering if I need to give it a comprehensive proofreading edit before I start shopping it around. Most likely it will be the case.
• Project B: Some revisions this week, not a massive amount. I need to pick up the pace on this.
• Project C: I have another poem or two I have been working on this week. I need to get some more transcribed and get a handle at how many more of these I need to get done. It might be something of a race, but I am excited by the challenge.

Again, here are my projected deadlines for those projects (an attempt by me to keep myself accountable for all of this).

• Project A, begin querying agents and publishers: Sometime in early-mid summer 2019.
• Project B, finish major redrafting of the rough draft (more of a second rough draft rather than a more focused revision): End of summer 2019.
• Project C, finishing creating rough draft poems: End of 2019.

I plan to put out a quick mid-week post reminding everyone of my upcoming events, because one of those will go down on Saturday. If you’re around the Muscatine area Saturday, I hope you can make it out.

That’s about it for now. I’ll be back here later.

[PHOTO NOTE: We’re having a lot of flooding around our area rivers here in Iowa, and this was the first image that popped up when I searched for “river flooding.”]