Challenging Times

Authors note: This was meant to post Sunday night, but for some reason Blogger’s automatic scheduler didn’t post right…unless I did something wrong, which, you know, never happens... ;-)

Here’s a bonus post for you all this week! I actually meant to do this yesterday, but didn’t quite get that done. You see, yesterday was the first day of a challenge.

A challenge to myself that is.

I shared last week that I had signed up for Camp NaNoWriMo and hadn’t really gotten anywhere. All I want to do is finally finish the Work in Progress that I started during June.

Then I came across this article the other day where author Charles Sheehan-Miles challenged himself to write a novel in 14 days. I had read about a similar self-challenge from an author who wrote a novel in a week, but that always seemed unobtainable. However, Sheehan-Miles took a more relaxed approach. What really caught my attention is that he said he still worked his full time job while doing this self-challenge.

As I digested that article, I pulled out my calendar. Ah-ha! Just as I suspected. The next two weekends are the first weekends I have nothing major planned for since the turn of the season. And bonus! September 3^rd is a holiday so I don’t have to work!

It all seemed too good to be true, so, I decided if I were to do this challenge, the time was now.

I’m not going to say that I think this will be easy. But since my goal is simply to finish something I’ve already started, I feel I can do this.

Question: have you ever gotten to a point in your writing where it feels like if you don’t take the time to finish your project now it’ll never be done?

In other news, I love twitter.

Okay, maybe it’s not the actual social network that I love, but more of the twitterspher and the community of writers that I’ve found there. There are tons of amazing people that I’ve met since May.

One person that I met on Twitter that I want to take a moment to mention here. James Crawford is a writer, graphic designer and amateur blade smith who always seems to know when to tweet something to make my day.

Such was the case last Monday when he tweeted a link to me and another writer, Frankie Blooding, saying “…because you inspire me.”

Check out the link and leave a comment!

And before you ask, yes, Frankie and I have been talking since then. (I’ll leave you and your imagination to that!)

And speaking of Twitter, it was through a casual twitter interaction that I landed my first ever guest post.

Ross Gale had sent me a tweet earlier this year, shortly after I began taking my writing more seriously. He was intrigued that I was a journalist and fantasy fiction writer. He asked me to write a blog about the challenges I face in my writing life so he could feature it in a creative series he would be doing.

Yesterday that post went live – you can see it here. Please feel free to leave a comment there too!

Finally, I’ve decided to change up my posting scheule a little bit. Instead of posting regularly on Tuesday nights I will be posting on Thursdays now.