Chasing Chickens, A Room of My Own, & Jumping Back In

What have I been up to this week?

Traveling! We went up to Upstate NY on Wednesday and spent an idyllic weekend hanging out with great friends who have a farm up there. It was lovely. Thing 1 and Thing 2 chased chickens and played with their dog and swam for hours in their pool. Andy and I enjoyed knocking back a few beers and enjoying some lovely catching up and relaxing. I also successfully hypnotized one chicken, so the old Taylor skill remains!

Really, it couldn’t have gone better.

But with the end of July, the writing-itches are back HARD, so I’m hoping to get back into the writing flow in August. I cannot tell you how excited I am to dive in to word-smithing again.

OH! But in other news! Andromeda Spaceways #87 came out today, which includes my short sci-fi story, “Dynamo.” What if a ruthless space bounty-hunter started poking around your ordinary life, convinced you were hiding his prey?

Check it out here!

What’s been inspiring me lately?

Whoo, boy. Okay. So a week ago, I was talking to my mom about some office space in town I’d seen advertised, and in the course of three days, we have a shared office rented! I AM SO EXCITED.

Quiet. Tidy. No kiddos. Walls of books. Wholly devoted to writing? YES PLEASE. It’s officially a room of my own! (Or, okay, a room of “our” own, but still! We alternate needed times, so it’s ESSENTIALLY a room of my own!!!) I’m so thrilled, you guys. And it’s really reasonable, price-wise, so while it lights a little fire under my butt to get producing and maybe make some of it back, it’s not so stressful that I seize up creatively. I still can’t believe it! SO EXCITED. More on that next weekend, after we’ve broken the space in. I need to move my desk in, among other things, and I’m still trying to figure out a groaning-couch (obviously, a couch you lay on and groan on, which is my usual manifestation of “thinking”).

Otherwise, I’ve been getting my assorted notebooks up and ready to go! I’m a little worried that having three notebooks I use regularly may make my brain explode, but I may end up leaving my writing related one at the office for documenting progress there, which might make it feel less overwhelming. I’ve also gotten my new Baronfig Confidant set up and ready to go for August, so I’m looking forward to kicking that off. Keep an eye on my Instagram account, where I post notebook shots.

My third notebook is what I’m calling my “hashbook”–a place to do writing exercises, Writing-Down-the-Bones practice, hash out ideas (hence “hashbook”), and generally write down the nitty-gritty thinking involved in writing. We’ll see how that goes!

What am I working on this coming week?

Jumping back into writing! Six weeks appears to be my max “down-time” from writing. It’s been great in that I haven’t felt horribly guilty about not writing, as I’d planned not to, and I’ve spent oodles of time just reading for fun and kicking back, playing outside, and enjoying some video games and chilling. It’s been incredibly refreshing.

But I am AMPED to get back to it. I’ve got a handful of healthy writing-related habits I’m going to start trying to ease into this next week (most notably: reading a short story a day), and I’m going to write at least 5 minutes every day for the coming week (maybe more if I can get into the office sometime during the week), just to reestablish the habit.

I’m planning out a new 12 Week Year set of goals, which are focusing primarily on habit building and producing a rough draft of my weird novel-in-progress, Dirty Bone. The premise? What if a man discovered a skeleton living in a dirt house attached to his basement, and ended up having an affair with her? BECAUSE OF COURSE HE DOES.

Yeah, it’s a weird one. But I’m having a lot of fun with it and just playing like crazy, so I’m going to be leaning into that hard. My other goal for the next twelve weeks is to get into the house-tending habits outlined in Simply Clean, because the less I need to think about keeping the house clean, the more space I’ll have in my head for writing.