February: When reality hits. We are no longer riding off the coattails of the excitement, hope and motivation the comes with a new year. Parents are preparing for and adjusting to kids going back to school; We’re actioning strategies we promised our boss last year when February was so far away; The free trial at the gym is ending and you’re starting to get hungry on your diet.

Too much change and not enough magic in the air. You’re settling back into the familiar to get you through your responsibilities, forgetting that your creativity, health and fitness are also your responsibilities. It’s time to recalibrate.

This month I was gentle on myself. It was a win if the only writing I did for the day was just a few scribbled notes in my notebook; to write 200 words on my WIP; to write 3 days a week. I had to remind myself this is more commitment I’ve shown myself in years. I’ve had to acknowledge how my thoughts and feelings about myself and life have changed since inviting creativity back into my life. Here’s to The Creative Life.

W R I T I N G

• 1 x Blog post
• 5,342 words of my WIP: Working title ‘Just Friends’

BLOG
The highlight of this month was starting this blog! I won’t go into why this is a huge achievement for me; you can read about that in my first blog post. It’s another way I am committing (to myself) to writing and practicing discipline.

I can get granular and count all the emails, articles, and reports I’ve written for work, but this writing it’s not about that writing. It’s about the deep work, the writing I am choosing, and all the stuff I am doing on my own terms to make my writing dreams come true and drink from my creative well: Live a Creative Life.

WIP
Writing a story is not just about the words; it takes just as much time, effort, and creative energy to think about the plot, characters, and story. While I had a light month, word-wise on my WIP, I did have a breakthrough in my story.

My first or zero draft is almost a stream of conciousness where I am just writing and writing to get the story out and down. In this phase, the story takes the driver’s seat and I’m the passenger trying to keep us on track as we rally drive through new and uncharted territories.

This draft is full of inconsistencies, plot holes, grammatical and spelling errors as well as surprises, raw emotion, characters, events and relationships.

I always intended this story to be a dual POV and ‘planned’ it to be this way. However, upon writing, the single POV had so much more to say, I couldn’t hear the second POV’s voice. Now, at about 20,000 words, I’m feeling the depth and tension waning and the whispering of another voice wanting to be heard. So here I go, moving forward, adding the second POV to keep the story going, and it feels right.