October 2019 - Writing from Neverland

Okay so this weekend, I tried to plot out more bits of the We Don’t Talk About Book Club universe which started as a kind of Nanowrimo dare type one-shot story. It was supposed to be a self-contained fun one-shot story.

To the complete lack of surprise to my beta-readers, it did not remain a one-shot. So my plan this weekend was going back to kind of figure out more about the world and overarching conflicts and some of those behind the scenes moving parts. The universe is quite popular among some of my Patrons so I had picked one of the earlier stories that hadn’t gotten fleshed out yet to focus on. Outlining it out on the whiteboard ( because my brain wasn’t being a help much this weekend) revealed several things that I had not previously known before.

There is apparently a constabulary type organization in my shadow world and one of the MC’s not-a-boyfriend’s is one of them. That my MC has a particular hate-on for some of those folk that ties back to her choosing a mostly mundane life up until then. That incubi lore is rather thin on the ground if you’re trying to not use the Catholic mythologies and don’t have access to certain books (I’m ILL-ing one of them and put one on my list of books to buy when I start buying books again).

Also that there’s a wedding I semi-forgot about and in the process of figuring out all of the above, also realizing that I’ve created the perfect circumstances for an inter-dimensional war. My goal was actually to try and make things less complicated, not more. Failing at that is pretty on brand for me.

Writing is not for the faint of heart, ya’ll.

So earlier this year my household decided to cut the cord. Just as an experiment because we were both stuck in a kind of rut where we just got home from the respective day jobs and sat and just zoned out to whatever random TV we decided on that evening.

It wasn’t good for our writing or for getting house chores done or really anything.

So we decided to cut that cord and see how that would impact the household. We weren’t going completely cold turkey because we knew neither one of us would be able to deal with that. We still had our Prime and Netflix accounts and the living room TV was one of the smart TVs so we could also connect the Movies Anywhere/VUDU apps to it to be able to access the digital copies of the movies we own. We also rediscovered our Spotify accounts and being able to play some of our lists off the TV is pretty awesome.

Neither one of us can work well without background noise so having those options available has been good for our productivity levels.

We’re seven months into it and so far we haven’t missed it much (my kingdom for the ability to just pay for MSNBC without having to pay for packages of stuff I neither need or care about – at least there are podcasts of the shows I actually care about oh well). It forced us out of the rut and while it hasn’t always been sunshine and daisies, it’s been a lot better for both of us, in terms of actually being able to get things done. For me, particularly, it has helped me whittle down the list of things I needed to watch/read/listen to. That list was getting seriously out of control and this push was what I needed to gain some momentum there.

I have been able to finish several things I kept meaning to, but time kept getting away from me, etc. Cutting the cord took away some of my excuses and that was grand, all on its lonesome. Granted I have some complicated medical issues that don’t always allow me to get everything I want to get done accomplished in the timeframe that I want.

Cutting that cord however gave us back money in the household budget and made us really stop and think about the habits we’d acquired and why we’d acquired them.

It’s not the answer for everyone, but it’s done a lot for us in terms of mental and physical health.

So for anyone else thinking about it or if you have questions about it, let me know. Happy to answer anything about our thought process going into it and what we told Comcast when we dropped it.

Month: October 2019

Weekend Writing

Cutting The Cord