Jeremy C Kester

I took a purposeful week off blogging this past week. Honestly, I ran into a small window where my life became a bit unmanageable. It was nothing big; there was no tragedy. Simply put, my priorities got all screwy where my lack of skills in time management resulted in it being better that I sat the writing aside. It was better to think, to debate what I was after in this whole endeavor.

Maybe a lot of it came from my perceived failure at the White Oak Author Fest. I am far from impervious to stress, and I stressed a lot during that event. By mid-week last week, I almost sputtered out entirely. Today I am only getting back a little steam to push forward.

But no matter the events, it’s best to come up with ways to spin it into the brightest of ways. For me, it meant that rather than worry about writing as a direct activity, I focused on revision and planning activities. While I did them, I gave my brain time to think over what I was after once again: how am I going to continue this push towards a writing career?

This question isn’t so much the why, but very much the how I am going to move forward. It involves the habits that I use to work on this process. It involves what my focus is. It involves whether I am even enjoying what I am doing.

The process of writing is more than writing as an activity of itself.

I wrote a lot last year; I’ve been trying to write a lot this year. But without the foundational efforts of planning, outlining, editing, revising, etc, my writing is only that… writing. And writing a lot doesn’t mean a damn thing unless I am going back through it, letting people read it, editing it, and then releasing it to the world to find readers to connect with it.

Otherwise it’s 7 projects sitting with a completed 1^st draft as I sit at a writers’ event with nothing new in 3 years while my anxiety puts me to the point where I am ready to break down in the middle of the damn thing. I was exhausted.

More so, this exhaustion is with myself for constantly trying to do too much without the right efforts. It’s like trying to get my car up to 120 mph… a suburban street. Sure, I might get there, but I am going to crash and burn into someone’s living room. With the right preparation, the right locale, etc, I can get that car—or rather my writing—up to the level I wish, without crashing and burning.

I think that this is a good spot to then talk about what I am going to do here. I want to keep up with this blogging thing, but I also want to spend more of my writing time on the other things I’ve been neglecting. So the blogging-every-day thing is not going to be a viable solution, especially as volatile as I proved my writing habits to be. Twice a week seems right. It feels like something I can manage. If it ends up being more, great, but two days should be my guarantee: Tuesdays and Fridays. With that I will be working more on improving the quality of each of these too. It might take a while, as anything worthwhile does.