Jeremy C Kester

While I wanted to be ready to produce a full examination into my writing habits for July, my plans changed after I was slammed by illness unexpectedly for the last two days of the month. It was bad enough that I was bedridden, with little ability to focus on much of anything outside of thought alone. I tried podcasts, YouTube videos of the Rubin Report (and ASMR vids too), and even video games, all to no avail. That was even when I wasn’t trying to read emails from the work that was undoubtedly building up from my day job.

Anyway, to put a long story to rest, it killed my writing dead right at the tail end of the month. Right when I had a load of things to work through, pushing a lot of stuff back that I’d already been pushing back to make room for other events that have been popping up in my life.

Suffice to say, my skills at managing tasks, even those tasks I am most excited about, are not very strong. Without the help of illness, I continue to allow myself to be the same Jeremy from Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH: always ready to see the next shiny piece of string. I am too easily distracted. Even away from things that I want to focus on.

Now before I belittle myself any more, I did write more fiction than any prior month of writing. It allowed me to finish off another project and move onto yet another. In that aspect of my writing, things are still going strong. Getting better even. Including days I actually wrote, I am close to averaging 1300 words a day… a fantastic number to be at given that I am balancing this hobby with another career and family.

But it cannot be all great things. I am struggling, as my other writings show. My blog has all but died. My non-fiction projects had dried up. Yet I still have things to talk about!

August will be a month of repair. Repair from these last two days being so sick I could barely function. Repair from a willful failure in blogging. Repair in losing focus on writing as a whole and not only a vaunt into fictional worlds. And a repair from delaying the release of other projects that are so close to ready to be released that I just need to give them that final push.

Of course, we’ll see how that goes. At least I’ll be writing!