narcissadeville

[narcissadeville]

Learning New Tricks: On going back to school in my 30s

I’ve been thinking about going to school for my Masters almost since I graduated with my Bachelor’s in 2014. I’ve also–it should be noted–thought about learning coding or even continuing my learning of HTML (since I took a class in it as part of my Bachelor’s in Graphic Design). But I didn’t do either of those things. It would be easy to get down on myself for this fact. To bemoan the fact that…

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Creative Exhaustion

So it’s been about a month since I finished my Milwordy and wrote 113k words in 2 weeks. For some insight, NaNoWrimo is 50k words in one month. So I did what amounts to two NaNoWriMos in half the time. And I’ve been experiencing what I can only describe as like creative exhaustion, and general exhaustion but that’s just kind of a summer thing. I have written, I’ve come up with a number of…

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Doing What You Love

I have a bone to pick with the old adage, “If you do what you love it’ll never feel like work.” And since this is the medium in which I seem to want to overanalyze fairly innocuous sayings,  I guess this one is next up on my list.  Over the course of my entire writing career one truth has always remained constant, I never felt like I was ever actually doing the “work” of “being a writer” until I…

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What I Learned Completing the Milwordy Challenge

If you had asked me last August whether I imagined I would ever say, I wrote a million words in a year, I most definitely would have said, “No, are you kidding? What does that even look like?”  Now granted, I’ve been writing for the past twenty years, and one could reasonably argue that I most certainly have written well over a million words across that twenty years. But writing a million words…

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I know I'm still in my Hazbin era but I was re-reading Just like Heaven which is this human Au Ineffable Husbands fic and it's just soo good. The sort of fic that like makes you wanna be a better writer. It made me want to write a slightly longer GO/Hazbin crossover. Expanding upon the Hazbin Omens I wrote a while back of like the idea that Angel and Crowley were exes. I'm really enjoying this so far.

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I don't ever wanna hear anyone call Radiodust a rare pair when Bugs/Daffy which was like all over the Looney Tunes Insta account still only has like less than 300 fics on Ao3 LIKE

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What I Learned Writing a Novel for 20 Years

The first time I wrote, what would become, ‘Assassin of Witches’, I was about twelve years old. At the time, the story was less a novel and more of a novella, at best. Though you couldn’t tell me that. It was a far cry from the story it is now in many ways, but the heart of the story, and many of the characters have transcended time and space to still be in the story today. They’ve changed a lot…

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The Key to a Good Outline...

For most of my writing life I’ve been what is known as a ‘pantser’ (a writer who likes to fly by the seat of their pants) when it comes to creating a story. I always wanted to be someone who wrote outlines, but it just never seemed to work out for me. And that’s not to say I didn’t ever try to write an outline. I almost always made the effort but one of the problems I had early on was that even…

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Are All First Drafts Sh*t?

In my seemingly never ending quest to take a hard look at popular writing advice and give my own take on it, I find myself looking at the idea of the bad 1st draft (or shitty first draft if you prefer).  As writing advice goes it’s fairly straightforward in concept. It says, rather than attempting to edit as you go, that writers should simply allow themselves to create a terrible first draft…

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Lessons from the King: What I learned from Borrowing Stephen King's Writing Routine

This month over on my YouTube Channel (little shameless self promo for that)— I decided to try a little writing experiment wherein I decided to borrow Stephen King’s writing routine. I was hoping to accomplish several things with this experiment of mine.1) See if I could write more in a given month than I otherwise would have and 2) To positively affect my sleep schedule (hopefully). My sleep…

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The Joy of Writing: Why Fun and Creativity Matter in the Writing Process

When I was younger I remember I used to get very annoyed when people who were distinctly ‘not writers’ came out with books. I specifically remember being annoyed finding out that the Kardashians had written a novel. To me, someone who has dedicated their whole life to writing and in particular novels, it was offensive that people who didn’t even write the book were going to get credit and take…

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The Art of Descriptive Writing: Beyond 'Show Don't Tell'

One of the first pieces of writing advice I think I ever heard, and arguably the most general and overused is: show don’t tell. Now there have been many many MANY rebuttals to this, arguments, disputes, and yes admittedly a great deal of people who agree with the statement by and large, but I’m here to talk about why I think it’s bad advice in the sense that it is a) too limited of advice and b)…

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What is the Purpose of a Publisher? The Decline of Traditional Publishing

Over the last five years I’ve noticed an increasingly disturbing trend in ‘traditional publishing’, between increasingly slashed budgets, and an ever-evolving landscape publishers seem to be offering less and less. For a while now it’s been the expectation that new authors works should already have gone through a considerable amount of edits before even reaching a publishers desk. It’s been an…

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Overcoming Self-Criticism in Art: Building Confidence and Finding Validation in Creativity

Why is it that when it comes to art, we are so often our own worst critic?  Lately, I’ve been working on a new version of a very old book. As in, a book I’ve been working on off and on for the past twenty years. In fact, the last time I had a writing blog like this I was working on this very book. And when you’ve been working on a story for twenty years you amass quite a bit of information about…

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Redefining Expectations: : The Key to Sustainable Success

“Expectations lead to resentment,” – RuPaul  For as long as I can remember I’ve had high ambitions for myself. I’ve known what I wanted to do, and nothing short of meeting and exceeding those goals would ever suffice.  Or at least, that’s how I was.  If there’s one thing I’ve learned now that I’m 32 it’s that my expectations have changed a lot.  I feel like that sounds negative. Like I’m…

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About Me

32 writing, knitting, DIY, acrylic pouring.

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