Hello, Wednesday! (What's Up Wednesday)

This week's post was going to be a long, really involved list of indigenous fantasy books out there, but as happens with a lot of research, I came up with an entirely different conclusion than I expected and thus have to completely rethink how I'm going to do that post. (Also if you have recommendations for fantasy/speculative fiction/sci-fi written by Indigenous authors, please let me know!) So today I'm just going to fall back on the ol' What's Up Wednesday formatting and we'll just have a nice chat. Grab yourself a cup of coffee or your preferred hot drink and get comfy.

Reading

All the fantasy! One of the reasons I want to make a book list is for my own TBR. I'm now to the third book in NK Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy, The Stone Sky. I'm very excited to see how the end of this series ends up because so far each book in the series has ended with a solid bang. She's such a good writer, please go read her books.

Writing

After spending a few years working on two different contemporary books (which were necessary for my state of mind), I've delved deep into fantasy! I have about 25k of a new fantasy thing and it's so much fun! I love the crazy imagination that can go into fantasy. If you want to see a few lines of that, you can check out my #1linewed tweets on Twitter. This is also the first time I've ever spent a significant amount of time world-building and outlining before ever sitting down to write. My mind is always set on the concrete productivity of word count, so sitting down to spend hours not actually physically writing was torturous sometimes, but SO worth it. Now when I am writing, I don't get stuck (as often) after a few pages because I know the characters, the world, and where I want the story to go. I'm just like whyyy did I not do this before now?? I mean I'm still a pantser at heart (my outline is one page and a lot of "a bunch of stuff happens to get them from this point to this point"), but I'm definitely becoming a plotter convert.

Life

In my last update post about six months ago I said that I'd graduated university! Well I have since finished all traveling and settled into the ups and downs of funemployment as I look for work after university. It has been fun having more time to do personal projects, writing (hello, finishing two drafts in the space of three months), cooking and spending time with people, but I'm starting to get a bit antsy. I also feel like I may have been a bit ambitious with my goals for the blog this year, but it's still early yet! If you have any ideas or comments about what you might like me to write about on the blog this year, please comment and share! Or even tell me what your favourite kind of posts have been over the years.

Happy Wednesday!

Onward

Hey! So I'm actually working on writing lately (and a million other projects, if you're interested in one, go ahead and request to follow me on Instagram @asherlockwrites), so haven't had a lot of brain power to devote to blogging. I always have such high hopes to make this thing BIG! Alas, I just do whatever I want like I usually do, share a little slice of my love of reading and writing with a handful of you.

So let's do this!

Writing

As I've said I've been writing! Well kind of. I've been working a poem project thing (see my Instagram), thinking of editing a short story, aand working on some not-writing writing work like character worksheets and other world-building stuff. I'm curious if you're into writing, how do you block out time for that kind of writing extras - research and world-building and all that stuff? That stuff that feels a whole lot like procrastination to me a lot of the time, so I avoid it because I'm not getting word count. Which is really dumb because that kind of stuff is really important. Thinking through stuff is actually a huge part of writing, it's just that if that's all you do then you're in trouble. It's a balance, I guess. Why does this writing stuff have to be so haaard??

But I'm actually waiting on feedback from a couple of people anyway so don't want to dig in to another rewrite quite yet, so this is the perfect time to spend on all that extra - excuse me, essential - stuff. And it's fun! I even have Pinterest inspiration boards for my made-up town and a bunch of my characters. 

If you are writing, researching and world-building all at the same time though, how do you divide it up? Or do you do one before the other? Go back and edit later? Tell me your secrets!!

Reading

I finished A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers like two weeks ago and I'm STILL NOT OVER IT. It was so much fun. My review of it made both of my parents immediately buy the ebook so check it out! I did manage to finish Banana Heart Summer by Merlinda Bobis after which is a beautiful, delectable story that made me crave aalll the Filipino food, but now I'm in a reading slump. I think I might DNF the book I'm trying to get into now and skip on to the next one.

Life

 

What else has happened recently? Well, in April I graduated university, in May a friend and I started to talk about booking a trip for the summer, and in June I quit the part-time job I've had for the last year to travel for the summer, and my last shift is in two weeks! Crazy. It's been fun not doing school and working part time and having more time to spend with friends and to write (or avoid writing with other things, let's be honest). I have no idea what the future will hold past the end of August but I'm feeling okay about it for now!

What have you been up to? What have you been reading? What are your best writing tips?

What's Up Wednesday

I have no idea if the official What's Up Wednesday is still a thing, but I figure it's time for an update and I like the formatting. (The original What's Up Wednesday was created by Jaime Morrow and Erin Funk to help writers stay in touch!)

What I'm Reading

If you didn't already know, The Queen's Thief series by Megan Whalen Turner is one of my favourite series of all time, and the fifth book in the series came out this week after seven years! So I'm currently halfway through rereading the series before reading the new book, Thick as Thieves. That is probably going to consume me for the next few weeks, and then I really need to get started on reading stuff for Women in Translation month in August!

What I'm Writing

I have been working on rewriting the book I finished in December, and I am currently at about 34,000 words. I have been making good progress on this thing. I even made a semi decent outline before rewriting, which is not something I usually do. Because of that, I think if I just sat down and powered through, I could probably finish it in maybe a month. Except I keep giving myself a million other things to occupy my time when I'm not at work... heheh. I was thinking of doing Camp NaNo, although now it looks like there's only sessions in April and July. Another year I did it June and that would've worked better for me... we'll see. Maybe I'll do my own Camp NaNo in June. Anyone want to join me? ;)

What Inspires Me Right Now

Weirdly enough, the beautiful storytelling of the TV shows The Get Down and Skam have really inspired me lately. They are the kinds of art that are so good that they make you want to sit down and create art. And also Megan Whalen Turner's genius, of course.

What Else Is New

Well in April I finished my second to last year of university! Next year I will be graduating with a 4-year Bachelor of Arts in Social Sciences with a concentration in Intercultural Studies. I also started my full time summer job a day after I was done everything for school. This summer I'm working at a volunteer department, helping coordinate volunteers. I really enjoy it - it's always busy and there's always something different to do. In just my first month, I've had to fold clothes, organize a uniform swap, call someone to tell them a visitor dropped their phone in with the snakes, go to and help set up volunteer trainings, send a million email reminders, and have lots of lengthy conversations with talkative volunteers who ask a million questions. And that's not all!

So work has been keeping me pretty busy since it's full time, and then I get home and I'm too tired to do much of anything. But I'm still trying to work on my own projects, like my book, this blog, and my garden! I am going to attempt to grow things this summer, although I'm such a newbie gardener, we'll see how it goes. Anyway, I think this summer is going to be hectic, but fun!



What are your plans for summer, writing or vacation related?