September Books: 3/5 (Star Shipped and Into the Drowning Deep)
Oops. Oh well. Except I’m in the middle of three nonfiction books and those always take longer to get through.
October Books: 0/5
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Where did September go? (Do you remember? The 21st night of September?) It was a month of such promise and now it’s gone.
(I did get my highest word count of the year, so not a loss. But gone too fast, RIP.)
Now October is here, and I love October! It’s my birthday month, it’s autumn (though we’re back in the 80s today, bleh), and it’s spooky season!
But I’m starting to feel overwhelmed again about how slow progress has been this year. I’ve been working on this short story project literally all year long, and it’s sitting at just under 20K. I’ve barely submitted anything anywhere, including queries. I joined this new community recently and we’re supposed to be writing now that it’s October, and I haven’t planned the generation ship story in detail because the shorts aren’t done.
(I am about halfway through this final story which, should, in theory, be the easiest, because I’ve written it before. It is not going easier.)
Add on to that that MileHiCon is at the end of the month and I am going to go this year, even though they’re still at the new, farther away location. But there is an element of imposter syndrome creeping in there. My last major release was Hallowed Hill, which came out in 2022. Even Deep and Blue is a few years old at this point. I was afraid, when Turtleduck Press went under, that it would negatively impact my output without deadlines, which has proven to be true, even though I know that Turtleduck Press had run its course and reached the end of its life.
But, I mean, there are people out there who write one novel and coast on that for the rest of their lives. And I am still writing, still learning, still trying. We’re just in a more stressful period of life, and we need to give ourselves grace. We’ll get back to where we were.
But the urge to compare, if you know what I mean.
Nothing to be done except to keep on trucking, however.
When I get overwhelmed I tend to shut down and procrastinate (as I think a lot of us probably do), and so I think I need to break everything down into tiny little steps and focus on one step at a time. And we’ll get there, just, perhaps, slower than one would hope.
What are you up to these days, squiders? What are you doing for fun?
