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So it is the last day of January and I have written 5249 words for the month. I plan on writing more today, but I’ve planned on writing more all month so we’ll see how that goes. It’s a far cry from the hopeful 20,000 word goal I set for myself, but I can either freak out and stress over it or just acknowledge what happened and move on.

I’m going with the latter. The closest thing I had to a second dad passed away in the middle of the month suddenly (fourteen days ago). It wasn’t expected, it wasn’t known, he went in for a checkup, was sent to a hospital, transferred to two more hospitals, had two surgeries, didn’t wake after the second one, and passed away four days later. His daughter and an extremely close friend of mine was here and I spent the following week with her (all last week). I took her to the airport Sunday morning (four days ago) and have only just begun to settle into my normal routine again.

I started my grieving process three days ago. 

I wrote a fourth of what I was intending to write this month and at the moment, I couldn’t give less of a shit. I’ll get there; I’m not worried. Instead of writing, I’ve been binge reading. And I’m okay with that. The words will come when I need them to come, when I want them to come, and after the emotional train wreck this month as been, I’m not going to punish myself for taking life as it comes.

Reading:

I’m not even going to explain/excuse why I read what I read, but here’s the list since my last post:

It was, essentially, a week and a half of grabbing books I thought would be quick and painless reads only to be left lacking before finally returning to a series I’ve been slowly reading because I love it so much, I’m terrified of overindulging to the point of losing interest.

Have to say, Tangle of Need is the 11th book in the series and I’ve read countless more short stories related along the way and I still love it as much as I did with the first book I read. I can’t wait to read the next one.

Photo by Oscar Keys on Unsplash.

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I finished the Couch to 80k boot camp! I have a mix of relief and mild panic at completing it. On one hand, I have a wealth of newly discovered resources at my disposal now. On the other hand, I’m back to being my own motivation. And that’s…not been that great.

It was surprisingly hard to sit down and write last week after I completed week 8. Granted, I got sick and there’s been a death in the friend-family, so I’m not surprised that the last thing I want to do is write. On the other hand, I know writing will temporarily help extract all those churning emotions I can’t currently process, so I’m hoping to see how it goes.

I am, however, seriously considering started a separate project from my current one. I realize that this could be a distraction because I’m dissatisfied with the very rough first draft that I have written, but I’m also aware that this could be a need to diversify what I’m writing about. I’m not certain yet, but I’ll see how this week goes before I get further.

Current word count: Pathetically low.

Reading:

I actually did read one of the books I mentioned last week: Cover Me. (I know, I’m even surprised at myself.) You can see my review here. I am definitely interested in continuing on to the sequel, but we’ll see how that goes.

The second book I read was not on my potential list, but actually out of left field. I needed an easy thing to read that didn’t require a lot of brain power, so I read Delicious. It definitely has much more of a plot than it advertised, which I absolutely did not mind. I had a few minor issues with the book, but overall enjoyed it. Tyler definitely ended up being my favorite character.

I have no idea what I’m going to be reading this week. I know I have quite a few non-romance books waiting to be read, but I’m having a hard time bringing myself to read them. Part because two of them are by highly regarded male authors following a male character and I really don’t want to find out if they can’t write a female character well. It’s almost as if the longer I put it off, the better chance I have of being surprised. I hope.

We’ll see. I’ll probably dive back into a Sarah McCarty book, simply because reading her makes me happy.

Photo by Kat Stokes on Unsplash

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I completely forgot to post this yesterday. What a wonderful start to my new updating schedule. No pretty picture to make this post look nicer because I’m at work.

I can’t remember my final word count for last week, but I know it’s low. Much lower than where I ‘should’ be according to my word count goal. However, I’m still in the Couch to 80k Writing Boot Camp, so I’m okay with that. 

Week 8 has been going…mixed, really. It’s focusing completely on our current novel – the novel that I have fallen out of love with. All I can see are problems and issues and I’m very tempted to scrap the whole things. Thankfully, the combination of having good friends and being extremely stubborn is working for me and I’m going to push through it. Even if it ends up crap, it’s my crap.

I definitely haven’t been focusing time to writing, so that’s a problem too. I have to figure out where best to build it into my routine and go from there.

Reading

Promises Linger was exactly what I expected it to be and I absolutely loved it. Something about McCarty’s way of writing as spoken to me since I first read her eleven years ago. Absolutely loved it, but take my view with a grain of salt because I am definitely biased. 

Also (re)read Dark Prince by Christine Feehan. I read this book in high school and remembered thinking it was a good story, but the style of writing was far too flowery for my taste. Put it back on my to-read list because I wanted to take a second look at it, seeing as it is the first book of a largely successful paranormal romance series. I still stand by what I thought in high school: flowery. Way too flowery. Far too mushy for me to be able to deal with and while it was very frustrating, I’m glad I looked at it again.

Third book I read was an anthology, Legally Hot. You can read my review of it here, but TL;DR – On the scale of ‘kill it in a fire’ to ‘LOVE’, it was a solid ‘meh’. 

Not really sure what I’m going to read next. I want to binge on a few things, but I need to break up books that are by the same author, else I overindulge and then get sick of them. Thinking about hopping genres and reading Storm Front, as it’s been sitting on my sofa table for two months now. However, the person who said I need to read the series has also said that it starts slow, so I don’t know about that. 

Other options are The Name of the Wind, Cover Me, or The Chronicles of Chrestomanci. Watch me not read any of them. 

How did you decide what your “personal brand” was? I struggle because there are so many parts of me, so many contradictory characters I could become—how do you decide which ones to hold up to the light, and be the shining bits of you other people see?

stgibsonofficial:

Alright kids strap in because Momma has been philosophizing on this of late and she has some Hot Takes.

Cultural Context

Let me start by saying that “personal brand” is a concept that is being pushed hard right now on people, even very young ones. We live in a society where its not only possible but encouraged to curate your online presence into a recognizable essence, often with the unspoken aim of getting people to like and trust you so that someday they can invest in you financially or pick you out of the crowd for a job or project. This is not an inherently bad thing, and can be very fun and useful if leveraged in a healthy way, but it’s easy to fall into the trap of feeling like you need to brand yourself to exist and that you need to live up to the color-coded, curated, narratively unified version of yourself that exists online.

Suggested Reading

Before I continue I want to direct you to two amazing video essays about this issue, Lindsay Ellis’ essay on  the way creators manufacture authenticity, and Natalie Wynn’s Ted Talk on how performing a hyper-stylized versions of different philosophical opinions on her Youtube channel have helped her protect herself from as much harm as possible. They’re both kind of heady but they’ve both been really helpful to me in A.) branding myself and B.) learning to see myself as separate from my “brand”. Let’s continue.

Creator Identity

I am a creator in the age of the internet. To be specific, I am a writer and a poet and occasionally a public theologian. For me, my ~aesthetic~ is yes, a way to express myself, but it’s also the way I let potential readers get to know me, my vibe, and my writing, so that when I announce I have a new book out, they already like and trust me enough to buy it. I hope this doesn’t sound callous; I have a very meaningful intimate relationship with my readers that I see as having spiritual value, but I also know what I’m doing when I post selfies or chat posts that go with the witch-saint-loving aunt thing I have going on here. And I think that people who aren’t trying to connect the right people with what they have to sell, artistically or in terms of services or otherwise, have to worry about branding a lot less. 

I’ve been maintaining a social media presence as a writer for almost ten years now, and my brand has become more streamlined as I have grown into myself as an adult woman. I love this woman and respect her enough to know that she may change tastes and change her voice as she ages, and that’s fine too, but one thing that I’ve been moving towards in my mid-twenties is having what I call a “partially opaque” brand.

Opacity

 A non-opaque brand is one of total messy off-the-cuff realness with almost no boundaries between creator and fan (Amanda Palmer does this well) and a totally opaque brand is put forward by a person who seems so unified, so separate, so enigmatic, that the lines between creator and fans are quite stark (think Donna Tartt). I used to have pretty much the same aesthetic that I have now but a brand that was almost entirely non-opaque; I posted my feelings and opinions on everything, talked openly about every single update to my religious, mental health, sex, and social life, and was 100% accessible at all times to readers. In an effort to protect my time, energy, privacy, and art as I’ve grown, I’ve learned to have more boundaries, but I still post selfies and life updates (generally with a bit of an ~aesthetic~ veneer but not always) and encourage people to ask me whatever questions they have because being warm and accessible and loving is important to me. 100% opacity is not right for me because I want to be able to show up at book cons and hug fans and answer life advice asks and be honest about things like burnout or spiritual doubt or personal branding (how’s that for meta). I think if you are a creator on the internet it is very important to decide from the get go how opaque you want your brand to be. 

For me, adding more opacity helped me distinguish my own life and value from what people on the internet thought of my work or my opinons, and it helped me to stop giving an excess of energy to places where I wasn’t getting it back. Being a bit more of a mystery at times has opened up space in my life for Sabbath and leasiure and getting back in touch with who I am when the lights go down and I am no longer on a virtual stage. 

The Fragmented Self

No one out here, not even the most deliriously aesthetic dark academia blogger with a watertight color scheme, is just one thing. When we brand ourselves (and yes it can be a holy act of connection and self-revelation when done right) we bring forward things about ourselves that are important to us and have narrative cohesion and present them in a beautiful way. When I do personal branding for small businesses like Fratres Dei spiritual direction, we do long self-exploratory sessions to determine which facets to bring into the light. But all of us contain multitudes and oftetimes our lives don’t have the sense of narrative cohesion the internet thrives on. Sometimes we can leverage that (I learned early on that there was no hiding my love of the Bible and of esoterica, my heavily religious life and my wildly doubtful faith. They were already so present in my writing that I stopped trying to hide it and Lo and behold I found the right readers, God bless them) and sometimes we can’t, and that’s okay.

I suggest locking on to the things about yourself that you feel are most essential and have the most vitality, and then putting them into conversation with each other and trying to find connections. If there are ones that don’t connect to the others, that’s lovely, that’s a holy thing, but it may not belong in your online personal branding. Maybe that’s a private thing for now to be enjoyed between you and loved ones, to germinate until it can find a place in your public life, or to stay blessedly secret.

My advice? Always leave a part of yourself at the end of the day for yourself. You don’t own this blue hellscape every ounce of you. 

Tl;dr A successful brand is an authentic version of yourself, just a little bit more tailored, and part of that success is deciding up front how much of yourself you want to share with others. 

In case you’re teetering on the idea of giving the Couch to 80k Writing Boot Camp a shot, here’s an actual quote from an episode:

“Keep the fantasy within the limits of known science please, even if the idea of having a whole day free to do what you like currently feels about as feasible as mid-morning consensual buttplay with an emotionally intelligent xenomorph.”

So I mean, the question shouldn’t be if you’re going to do it, it’s really a matter of when.

🙂

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I officially started Week 7 of the Couch to 80k workshop I’ve been doing. Definitely a little late, but I took two weeks off for the holidays. It’s been a little bit more difficult to get back into the routine again of sitting down everyday to listen to the podcast, but I need to do it. Once I get it going, it’ll be easier to translate toward writing.

I’ve made the goal of writing 240,000 words this year. I have no idea if this is doable. I don’t know how many words I wrote last year, but at least 120,000. Doubling that should be interesting. In an amusing and rare misstep in mental math, I for some reason convinced myself this equaled 2000 words a month. It wasn’t until I sat down and realized why this seemed wrong that I was missing a zero.

20,000 words a month is definitely a challenge from what I’ve been writing, but much easier than the Nano months I did twice. If I look at it by week, it’s 4616 words each week. By day, it’s 658. I’ll get there. I’ll have to push myself, but I’ll get there.

I haven’t officially written anything yet so far, which will come to bite me in the ass later this month. It’s surprisingly hard to write outside of the workshop, so I’m going to wait until I’m completely done with Couch to 80k before writing separately. I haven’t yet decided if I’ll count the words written during those exercises, but I probably will. They might not be words toward a novel, but they’re words I’ve written. They still count.

Reading

My reading goal this year is 90 books. According to what I accounted for on Goodreads, I read 65 last year, but there were many I didn’t count. My actual goal was 70, but I was sucked into a manga series that has 19 volumes. In order to count each volume as a book, but still keep my original goal for novels, I upped the number to account for those volumes. As of right now, I’m at 21% of the total goal. 

The manga series I read over the last week was Banana Fish. The next book I’m going to read is Promises Linger by Sarah McCarty. I’ve been hunting for this book for years and finally bit the bullet and purchased it for my Kindle. I can’t wait.

I’m hoping to post writing and reading updates once a week. It’ll help me keep this blog current and hold myself accountable for my goals. Now, to finally create that WIP page…

Photo by Clint McKoy on Unsplash.