Week Four

I’m rather obsessed with May Designs, Gentle Reader, and find them to be one of the best notebook makers on the market (next to those German notebooks I can’t pronounce but decidedly love).  I found this gem of a folio in Target, of all places, and knew it had to come home with me.  I have my two agendas inside of it: my daily and my weekly.  I absolutely love it!  But I think something has to happen soon with my daily journal, as right now, I’m just listing things and not really responding to them.

Do I want to bullet journal?  I don’t know.  It feels like one has to be awfully creative to bullet journal, and my creativity is all wrapped up in writing and cooking, I’m afraid.  When I was at some of my hardest points of mental health wellness–therapy, medicine, habits, all trying to work together in harmony–I kept reaching for arts and crafts as a way to Calm Down.  Unfortunately, because I was so very bad at them, they did the opposite and stressed me out completely.  I tried everything: knitting, painting, crafts, jewelry making, coloring, anything Michael’s could offer in its amazing store, I tried.  And I was awful at all of it.

Now, I know, you can’t master a thing when you first try it.  I’m a writer; I get that.  But I was so very bad at these arts and crafts that it stressed me out to the point that it wasn’t working as what I wanted them for: to calm me down.

So bullet journaling may be a bit much, but then, maybe I could write more completely in the journals.  Instead of listing my plans for the day, list what I did that day.  Or, list my plans for the day in one column, and my actual day in another?  The possibilities!  They overwhelm!

In other news, I am writing still every day.  I’m over 60K words into my MARVEL AMONG THE DEMONS MS, and I’m getting close to an end.  This is just the end of the first (well, 15th) major draft.  It needs drastic overhaul after that.  My goal is this: finish the MS by Spring Break (roughly 80K-100K), revise over Spring Break (all-day writing sessions ftw!), and get it off to my beta readers and my agent after Spring Break.  A worthy plan.  A month of work and a week of intense work.

Also, I’m using Fridays as my academic writing, but I’d like to do that every day as well.  I have the time most mornings, when I don’t have to be on campus early (unlike tomorrow, when I work from 8:30am-8pm).  I sent off one project that was a Revise and Resubmit, and now I’m working on another that was rejected from two journals for being too short and not fully researched (it was a conference paper turned article and yes, is short, and yes, needs more research).  So that’s what I’m working on now, which requires me reading some gorgeous YA rewrites of Austen novels.  Yay!  Have I mentioned how much I love my job?

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