Raised on a diet of broken biscuits

[venta]

Bookkeeping for New Year's Resolutions, March edition.

Last month, I wrote:

My sleeping resolution achieved something somewhere been decent success and catastrophic failure. Y'see, I've not been doing a bad job of getting to sleep reasonably early. Sadly, the expected benefits have not done their bit and shown up... I've spent most of February feeling tired, lethargic, out of sorts and out of clock.

Er... yeah. More of that. In general, I feel that life has been getting a bit out of my control - in fact, writing up March when we're already a week into April is symptomatic of a general lack of organisation and planning. I don't feel as if I've been ignoring life admin, but it does seem to be stacking up and getting away from me.

As yet, I don't have a strategy for fixing this :(

Writing is another failure - technically. I have been busily writing stuff. Unfortunately, it seems that my preferred writing MO is to scribble stuff down at random (with a pen! on paper!), leave it a few weeks/months, then type it up and edit it. This is not conducive to getting stuff out there quickly. I had a story written, and a destination in mind, but towards the end of March realised that I hadn't had time to do a decent brush-up job on it, and I probably shouldn't send something rubbish out into the world just for the sake of box-ticking.

Oh, and February's story came back with a rather damning rejection.

And for a hat-trick, not a great success on the reading front either. I mean, I haven't forgotten how to read or anything (and have got through quite a few books) but only one from my list. This is down to organisational failure. The stack of books wimble lent me has run out, and I forgot to order more in from the library. So I was ready and willing, but unable because I didn't have any of the relevant books to hand. By some mild jiggery-pokery (read: cheating) I can claim to have read two books from my list this month, but only because I added a new one to the list to make it so. Reviews to follow.

Comments

[huskyteer.livejournal.com]

It's hard to know what to do WRT submitting (possibly-) substandard stuff. If you don't submit at all there's obviously zero chance of acceptance compared to some chance if you send something you don't think is quite cooked yet. OTOH, I don't want to show anyone stuff I'm not proud of. On the other other hand, though, I'm rarely content with anything I've written, and even if I'm happy with it when I've just finished writing it I won't be a couple of months down the line...

[shermarama]

If you'll excuse me being one of those people who's diagnosed with something and then attributes everyone else's problems to being the same thing... I wonder if a fatigued February and March might be in part down to vitamin D deficiency? It's difficult to get enough sunlight at this time of year this far north as it is, and the horrendously extended winter has meant that in order to be outdoors, you have to be swaddled up to the nose and down to the eyebrows and barely exposing any skin. And that kind of tired, lethargic, unable to get out of bed of a morning nor concentrate with ease once I had is what seems to have been significantly reduced by the vitamin D supplements I got given.

[sea-of-flame.livejournal.com]

Have you considered joining a writing group? Knowing you have an approaching meeting where people will be offering up their work can sometimes help - both with dedicating time to getting some stuff ready to show, and with realising that other people's stuff ain't perfect either (and getting/giving feedback will help with self-critique)

Well, it works for homebrewing anyway. Possibly the fact the more everyone brings to the table, the more drunk we get, helps...