Michele Venne's Blog, page 15

Winding In

I’ve been “winding down” since September. With the purchase of a 2023 calendar and reviewing 2022, I’ve already made intentions for next year. For the past 3 weeks, I should have been “winding up” in order to finish the projects I wanted to publish in 2022. Instead, I’m “winding in.” This probably isn’t an actual phrase, but it’s what I’m feeling, what I’ve been circling around for months now.

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Just a Little Experiment

I’ve done more investigating into my writing process this year than I have since I began this adventure. Last week was one more experiment. I mentioned that to get myself to stop spending so much time on an “easy” project and spread my attention around to make progress on everything on my calendar, I would set a timer on my phone. When it went off, I would stop, get up, and move to the next task.

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Time Limits

More days than not, I’ve put a check in front of projects listed in my calendar. I’ve logged a lot of time with the next math book. Not much creative thought involved with that at this time. I’m just transferring a few years’ worth of warm up problems to a Word doc. The creative part will come later when I include a bit of introduction at the beginning of each section to remind students how to do...

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Multiple Choice Projects

Seven days ago I stared at the beginning of the next short story for Patreon and the muse revealed the tale. In the last seven days, I’ve dabbled with SG, and I started a project I tentatively had in the wings for 2023. This other project is nonfiction, so no concern for characters or setting or dialogue or story arc. In this next math workbook, I looked at pages of math problems I’d created when...

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Throwing Jax

When I was in elementary school, we played Jax during recess. We all carried a little rubber ball and some metal game pieces that were like 3-D X’s with an extra leg. After tossing a handful of jax onto the sidewalk, we would bounce the ball. Before the ball came back down, we had scoop up one jax. On the second bounce of the ball, we aimed for 2 jax, and so on. The quickest fingers...

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New Ideas

Rolling with the wave of inspiration, I worked on clearing out my paper calendars from the last 6 years. I write quotes, names of books and authors, ideas about marketing, page numbers of manuscripts I’m editing, phone numbers, promotions, royalties, and so many other tidbits of information. I write them down for the moment in order to capture their importance. I used time this week to compile the...

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Little Breaks

Some part of me knows something my conscious mind doesn’t: when a project is done (or I’m waiting to hear from beta readers or my cover designer), I take a break. I don’t plan them. They’re not in my calendar. What I believe I (can/should) do on the next day is pick up the next project and carry on. It’s in my calendar. And yet, something besides my action-driven, accomplishment-desired self slips...

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Momentum

With The Bookie and Building Fluency: Advanced Number Sense published and available on all platforms, and my third audiobook (Of Objects and Obsessions, Book Three of the Tanner Trilogy) completed and distributed, I moved on to the next project, Desert Zydeco. I finished the first episode and have the three parts scheduled to go live on Patreon this month. I had fun writing this.

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Another Check Mark in A Box

Know thy self, know thy artist. After my 4-month plan loaded with experiments, I returned to writing my manuscripts in a spiral notebook. I finally finished Desert Zydeco! I won’t list the many steps from handwritten draft to published file, but it amazes me every time how many pieces must come together before one of my books is released into the wild. And since DZ is also an experiment...

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Transition

Maybe it comes from understanding how life is, because when things are rolling along smoothly (and I recognize most moments when this is true), a part of me quivers, waiting for the next crisis, the next big decision, the not-so-smooth time that balances out those opportunities where I catch my breath. I wrote last week about things coming together all at once. It still seems I’m balanced on that...

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