The Long March – A Writing Retrospective

I need to open this by saying that March was insane. I never expected I would get through a whole month of dedicated writing, let alone two months worth! I thought my February was a difficult month for my writing but I could not be more wrong. Even with all the ups and the downs I encountered on this long journey, I never lost sight of my end goal. I kept sight of the purpose of my Writing Challenge and let that fuel me on my road.

Speaking of that road, it was a turbulent one this week. I will not say any part was easier than others, because every single day of each week offered a unique challenge. How I conquered those challenges was the true test of my resolve as a writer.

Therefore, it is with this update at the tail end of my ninth week of dedicated writing that I confirm the real reason I write. Not for fame or fortune, but for the reader. The best thing I can ask of all who read this is a couple of things.

Share this post with whoever you can. The more people that see my work, the more encouraged and motivated I get and that is a net positive for everyone.
Follow my blog (or my social media accounts) for all the latest posts to stay on top of everything.
Like my work. I cannot stress how discouraging it is to have people read what I write and dislike it. That leads into…
Leave me commentary and feedback. I consider my books to be the work of a community and I tend to read everything passed my way. It is the best way to let me know what is working and what needs work.

Now, without any ado, I bring you my March Retrospective.

General Duties

First of all, for those who do not know who I am, you can use my handy About Me page to find out all the information and quirks you will ever need to know about me to understand my work.

Second, if you are unsure of where to start, I highly recommend starting with A New Beginning – My Year Ahead or From the Vaults: My Only Poem to launch into pretty much anything on this site.

Last of all, thank you for having the patience to put up with my inane ramblings and wild writing style. I hope you have as much fun learning about my novels piece by piece as I do with writing them.

If you have further questions, you can always Contact me using any of the various methods outline there, though it is only three at present. Still better than no contact!

The First Week

The first day of March fell on a Thursday, but I consider the week of March starting Monday February 26. I know, that is not common, but my working week starts on the Monday and it would not do my writing justice to miss out on three key days in my writing.

The first week of March served as the fifth week of my Writing Challenge and the second week I began using my current report format. I found it was one of the more intense weeks in terms of all the work I did, but as you read through the reports for that week, you can see I still possessed a good deal of trepidation and lacked quite a lot of confidence in my work.

Of course, I could look at the bad in this week but there were also good parts to it. Perhaps the biggest thing I did in this week involved Writing Report Week 5 – Reality as I gave that novel a proper name. I also started up the Master Archive to make it easier for people to navigate the site. It will be undergoing an overhaul very soon to be more ergonomic and aesthetic than it is right now.

As far as the quality of my writing for the first week of March, I did not have the pizazz I do now. That is not to say I wrote any worse, but in my own mind, I was still conditioning myself into the writing routine and I had issues focusing on making the words the best possible. I am still proud of the work I did in Week One of March and I felt more consistent with my schedule.

This was also the week I included From The Vaults: The Story That Got Me My Degree as my bonus piece of writing for everyone to peruse and see an extended sample of my work.

Since this is a retrospective, I do not want to spoil any of the important parts of this week, so you are able to investigate further by accessing the posts directly. For your convenience, the posts from the first week of March 2018, in chronological order, are as follows:

The Second Week

Week Two of March was the week I joined Twitter to enable people more access to my work and myself as a person. It was also the week that the reality of the Writing Challenge set in. I felt I was in over my head at stages and that affected the speed at which I worked.

I didn’t give up though. The sixth week was nothing more than a speedbump for my psyche. I had to show I was in charge of my writing and not let my mindset control the work I did. It was a boost to my confidence to prove that I could keep up the intense schedule even under the growing stress of my personal life.

This was also the week that the temperature in Australia at long last dropped below 30 Centigrade. It takes a lot more energy to write novels when the temperature is high, so I had that to counterbalance the poor sleep routine I had that week. I guess that the second week of March really put things into perspective for me.

The biggest changes for this week was that I dropped the series title from Ascension and Earth Splitter. I figure there is more than enough information on them to justify people being able to figure out their series, so for me, that was all about efficiency.

The best parts of the week involved the fact that I did not give up. I looked to those around me for inspiration and I began to feel proud of the accomplishments I was making. They might not mean much to someone on the other end of these words, but for me, the sense of producing my work vindicated everything I worked for since I started my University Degree.

The posts from this week did not include an extra piece but I did update The Elder Ones: Sea Spray with a revision to the raw text. It will forever be available to purchase as an eBook or as a Paperback though I recommend the eBook edition, but not because I get 70% of the purchase price. I recommend it as it is easier to read on the move. In the world today, everyone is about efficiency, so the Sea Spray eBook is the way to go.

The posts for the second week of March, in chronological order, are as follows:

The Third Week

This was a big week in both the mental and physical faculties of my writing. My spirits were much higher than the second week and I experimented with a few new strategies to write. It was the first week I decided to write to a common theme and started to creatively name the titles.

I feel that the changes present in my writing reports reflect my writing style. The changes in what I post reflect my mindset for that day and include specific references I enjoy.

What it also signifies is my mind being fully concerned with the Writing Challenge. The seventh week of my Writing Challenge was when everything began to slide into place and make sense. My confidence hit a twelve year high and I began to smile at my own writing – which is rare because I don’t like smiling.

The downside of this week was of course my own attitude. My ego seemed to get the better of me, but it did not affect my work ethic. All that happened was I got a little slack with my writing in that I wrote in a lazy fashion. I feel I copy-pasted the structure this week and wrote to fit that and while not a bad thing in the long run, I never like to write to a formula. I want to write my novels as they come to me.

Nevertheless, the overall positive changes to my demeanour and the way I viewed my writing outweighed the bad. I got some good advice from some of my contemporaries that I attended University with, so that is always something that drives a writer to be better. We want to impress the audience and there is no audience more critical than other writers.

The posts for this week are in chronological order below:

The Fourth Week

It is an odd thing to count the penultimate week of a month as the Fourth Week instead of the Third Week, but that is what occurred for March this year. It was also a really bad week for my own psyche.

While I did enjoy the work I did, the strain of the Writing Challenge grows with every passing week and it almost erupted this week. Some of the time, I did not feel like opening the document and work most days. I called my own bullshit and made myself work for my sleep and in turn, I feel I churned out some of my best work to date.

It was also an experimental week for my writing. For most of my novels, I wrote in two separate chunks and it worked out quite well. It helped reduce my stress every day and allowed me to really think on each word. Not that I don’t think, but I often find myself rushed into doing things and that affects my mental state, so to not rush was a welcome relief.

The best parts of the week were on par with the worst, so I can’t really give this week a good retrospective, but it did have it’s place in my writing canon. It helped me discover techniques for breaking out of a funk and I utilised everything I learned to great effectiveness.

The week also found itself a week of me delaying certain plot points but for very good reason. I don’t think of it as procrastinating, but more like allowing myself time to develop a concrete idea while filling in the void with more about the world and the characters in the novel, both of which are ever important.

I also included my first foray into non-fiction writing as I provided a review of Antti Martikainen’s 2017 album Northern Steel. That was something I loved doing and I feel it is something I can look more into doing.

The posts for this week are as follows:

The Final Week

The fifth week of March came and went really quick. I find that my full time writing schedule is so beneficial in that I do not realise how much time really passes when I do something I enjoy.

As such, this was my most enjoyable week for pretty much all my novels. While I was still worried about burning out, that was not at the forefront of my mind. The most important thing for the last week of March was all about the words on the page.

It was the week I really realised how far I have come with the Writing Challenge. I find myself so consumed by how many words I write, that it did not set in until Saturday evening that I have almost written the entire length of Sea Spray since the Writing Challenge began.

To put that in perspective, it took me 3 years to write the entire story for Sea Spray and it totalled around 90,000 words. In the nine weeks of the writing challenge, if I don’t include my reports, I have written over 135,000 words. If I were to include my reports, then everything original for the Writing Challenge is larger than my only published novel. That fact sunk in on Saturday and it amazes me. I never thought I could be so prolific, but I continue to exceed all expectations put on me by… pretty much everyone over my entire life.

The reports for this week (Including this very post!) can be accessed with the following links:

Thank you for reading to the end here. I would give you a cookie, but I don’t have any.

I would be more than happy to hear from you, so if you could like and comment and share… that’d be great. 🙂

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