Sock It To Me, January
Well crud. You might have noticed I hadn’t posted the past couple of weeks. Yeah, I figured I’d let my blog slide while I dealt with offline stuff. It’s the last day of January, and it would seem 2018 is following in 2017’s steps.
I had an MRI last Wednesday, and I’ll find out next Monday if my wrist pain is caused by a cyst. Hopefully it’s something that simple, because according to the doctor, it’s an easy surgery with a quick recovery time. In the meantime, I’ve been rocking my situps and increasing the amount of weight I’m lifting. I’m up to 6500 lbs per session, having added in tricep extensions, bicep curls, dumbbell presses, and dumbbell swings, each at 10 lbs for 20 reps. If I keep the weights light, my wrist doesn’t bother me.
Writing wise, I haven’t been doing so great. I’m a creature of schedule, and if something mucks with that (say skipping work to go get an MRI), then my productivity kind of goes down the drain. And there’s been a lot of mucking with schedules lately, thus my default has been disaster mode. I managed to get 680 words this past week, which is close to my 700 words-a-week goal, but still falling short of where I want to be.
I also recently joined a facebook group. This was a gamble for me. I don’t do well in a setting that moves faster than I can keep up. But I figured I’d take the plunge and try to make some friends. Cautiously, I joined the group, posted my greeting paragraph, and then later posted asking for specific suggestions regarding my mythos.
Perhaps I could have been clearer. My brain gets pretty wild when it comes to checks and balances with regards to my world. It’s a scary place to be actually. The responses started out helpful, with planets and meteor impact sites. My creative juices bubbled with glee. And then I got a comment that sent me spiraling into an emotional torrent.
Develop your world more fully and it may come to you.
It wasn’t a rude comment. It wasn’t an attack. It wasn’t meant to be hurtful. But it felt like a slap in the face, and I didn’t take it well. It translated to “You clearly haven’t done enough thinking on this, if you are asking other people for suggestions.” I’m sure that wasn’t how it was meant.
I can usually take critiques on my writing in stride. But when I get “advice” on what I personally need to do, I react negatively (as this example shows from 5 1/2 years ago). It’s a personal problem on how I perceive what’s being told to me, one I haven’t been able to overcome in years. But it does derail my joy in the creative process, which leads to me spinning my wheels over what’s been said rather than focusing on my story. I’m thinking it’d be for the best that I don’t try to interact with strangers in an open forum, and if I do, to keep it superfluous and impersonal. Of course, that negates my purpose for joining the group, which was to make friends with fellow fantasy authors.
*sigh*
I think I’ll stick to blogs.
On a positive note, Ken, who is in the group, did provide a suggestion that I ended up using. Comets! I’ve got the timeline for when they appear all worked out, including what their appearance means to the population, and even had the revelation that their last appearance coincided with when the humans destroyed their homeland. I’m calling them the Harbingers because every time they show up, it means something bad is going to happen.
How do you react to advice? Can you recommend any fantasy author bloggers? Do you go crazy with your world mythos?
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