Robyn Writes

Marching On

Marching On

My blogging at least once a month is going well, as I’m sure you can all see… February and March have been BUSY. Work busy, life busy, writing busy, generally busy all over.

At work, I just finished off a project on community management strategy for a gaming website that I’ve been helping out with for a number of years, helping them to transition their social network to their main website. It’s been a great experience and I feel like I’ve done everything I can to help support a community that has been there for me through thick and thin. So that’s been good.

Life? I just don’t seem to have time to do anything, I’m always out and about. However, one good thing I’ve been doing with my time lately is popping along to a D&D games night set up by Proud Lion, the local comic book shop. It’s great fun, I’ve met a lot of really lovely new people and I’m finally getting back into playing. My role-playing still leaves a lot to be desired, but I think I just need to get back into the swing of being another character. I’d like to sit down and do a proper character sketch when I have the time and dig deep into what makes my half-elf cleric tick.

Writing busy, THAT’S A THING THAT’S HAPPENING. I wrote, edited, finished and submitted a story to a short story competition for the Evesham Festival of Words. I have no idea if I’ll win, get shortlisted or even longlisted, but at least I finished something and submitted something. I’m pleased with the concept, but genre fiction doesn’t always perform that well at these kinds of things so I’ll have to wait and see.

Now that’s over and done with, I suppose I’d better get cracking with my ‘Ready, Set, Novel’ plan. I’ve completed a few of the exercises but got distracted as soon as Mass Effect: Andromeda came out (I have more thoughts on that to follow up with soon). Setting aside time to write just seems impossible at the moment – I only managed the other story because it had a 2,500 word limit – but I’ve got to do it if I ever want to get a book out there.

Also, a quick Mount TBR update – I’m up to 11 books out of 24! It’s pretty exciting to (almost) hit the halfway mark, so exciting in fact that I went and splurged on a Humble Book Bundle collection from a bunch of great female authors… Whoops. That takes the unread Kindle library up to about 130 books? Jeepers. That said, I’m totally ignoring the Kindle in favour of physical books at the moment. I’m currently on Sarah Monette’s Doctrine of Labyrinths series, which is full of wizards, and swearing, and feelings. I’m reading The Virtu and it’s the best. You should read it too.

Metrics and Measures

Metrics and Measures

January’s officially out of the door, meaning that 31 days (and a few more) out of 365 have been and gone. It’s ridiculously cliché to say it, but tempus fugit and all that. I can’t believe where the time has gone already and how ridiculous the world has been in those few days.

However, I’m not going to go on about the state of the world for now. Instead, I’ve been trying to look at what I’ve been up to, and compressed them into various numbers to make it look more impressive. So, in those 31 January days, I have …

  • Read four books, or 1,170 pages if you’re feeling fancy
  • Written 1,086 words of a new short story called Guidance
  • Spent two days in London doing business things
  • Baked approximately 42 spiced nutmeg biscuits
  • Walked 181,339 steps (and it’s still not enough)
  • Written one article for a great website
  • Played around 15 hours of Final Fantasy XV
  • Raised my fist in triumph at 14 new AFI tracks
  • Cried at two different Mass Effect: Andromeda trailers

If you look at it like that, January wasn’t so bad at all for me. I’m feeling pretty posi about February, too. So far, I’ve properly kicked off a major project at work that’s basically my dream project, and although it’s been a lot of hard work so far, it’s been really fulfilling. Hopefully, I’ll continue to do some good stuff there but it already seems like it’s making an impact, which is great.

I’m also planning on doing lots more writing, if I can. I picked up Ready, Set, Novel! by the NaNoWriMo people to help me plot my next big idea — I think with a bit of additional help, I’ll be able to really solidify this one and make a good start. The only problem I have is that I have two big ideas that are totally incompatible and I need to choose which one to focus on first …

I’m going to finish Guidance, somehow, as well. I’m not feeling it too much at the moment, but I need to push through and actually complete it so that I can move on fully to the next thing. And I bought a new editing pen that’s a nice purple colour, so if I want to use it, I need to have a first draft to edit!

Mount TBR is progressing pretty well, too — four books down out of a possible 25. I seem to be going through Kindle books a lot faster than the print ones, probably due to the amount of time I spend on the bus each week, but I’m optimistic about hitting that goal. It’s also been great to dive back into the Kindle archive, see what I bought three years ago and discover how good they actually are. Has it stopped me buying new books? Well, seeing as I picked up Stephen King’s On Writing as I type this, then no. But it has forced me to pick up some treasures that I was otherwise missing out on.

So, I suppose that I need to continue forging through February and make it a good one. 2017, I won’t let you get me down, no matter how many depressing articles fill up my Facebook feed.