A new month

Well ... it's been nearly two months since I last rambled here. I'd like to say that I made my two month 80,000 words in 61 days goal, but the fact is I didn't even make 40,000. This is even more sad because of the fact that I was at 35,000 at the end of April ... a little behind the target, but close enough to easily make it up in May.

I'd like to say that it was work, or that I got really sick, or that aliens came and took me to another galaxy and I didn't have any way to write, but it wouldn't be right. The fact of the matter is, ultimately I gave up ... I stopped writing. Work did factor in as I got shifted to an early morning shift to work on a feature film, but really it shouldn't have stopped me from writing because I shouldn't have let it. In part I'd say it was what I had feared ... to a degree I burned out ... I enjoy writing, but I also enjoy practicing on my bass, and playing video games and it was starting to feel as though I was forcing myself to write at the expense of the other things I enjoy doing.

The other thing that I'm starting to come to the realization of is that Summer is a bad time for me (us actually as my wife has been having the same problem) to write. This is the third summer I've attempted a personal challenge and all of them have resulted in failure. My wife and I were talking about it the other day and she expressed the opinion that it may be because we feel that there's so much to be done, yard work, home improvement, and the like, that essentially we just can't focus on just writing like we can in the winter (Both of my successful NaNoWriMos were in November (of course) and my one successful personal challenge was in Jan).

I'm still planning on finishing this story ... I think I've got a good one going and it has potential of possibly being something I can refine and maybe submit. (Actually my last two NaNo's fall into this as well but still need to be finished off and then start the editing process.) To that end I'm going to start setting aside a scheduled writing time once I'm back on a 'normal' schedule. I'm still looking forward to NaNoWriMo again in November, but I think that if I try a challenge again next spring/summer I'm probably going to lighten it up more and try to be more 'casual' about writing for it.

For now I'm going to crawl back out from under my rock and return to the world of rambles and rants. I've already written more here this year than I did last year, I'm going to try and keep increasing that over the rest of the year. Up to this point I've ranted primarily about political issues and my writing, I'm likely going to expand that with discussions of my modeling hobby and video game hobbies and role-playing games ... and probably anything else that crosses my mind while I'm sitting at a keyboard and blogging.

Hopefully soon I'll also be making an announcement that we are offering some prints of some of the artwork that we presently have up over at Grimscale Studios as well as adding some new work that my wife has been working on.

For now, however, I just wanted to take a moment and let everyone know how my writing went and where things are going for me.