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Writing

Casual Writing NEW

Writing is One of My Biggest Hobbies

I love writing, and have been doing it since I was just a kid. I wrote my first "book" out of 8 sheets of cut up filler paper when I was in Kindergarden or 1st grade, complete with illustrations.

I've continued writing ever since, though to me it didn't seem that way. I've always been writing something: notes, diary entries, funny ideas that come to me. But I often considered it to be "not real writing". To me, "real writing" was when you finished something, like a short story or a manuscript, but didn't count otherwise.

I've come to realize that's not the case: all writing, if done in mostly-complete sentences with the intent to make sense, counts as writing. Now, it might be bad writing, but that's another story. I realized, after I counted this as part of my writing, that I actually write about 3000 words per day, on most days. That means I write about 1 million words per year. So much for not writing!

The biggest issue though, is that I just ... don't finish. I mean sure, there's an essay, and all the ideas are there, but it's just not good yet, so I don't share it with anyone. Or worse, it just floats around half finished. For example, when my old desktop died, I lost around 200 manuscripts and short stories and book chapters. AndI wasn't very sad. It was kind of freeing, in a way.

So I've just decided to embrace the "unfinished" aesthetic, and just write directly onto the blog, very raw. Instead of marking when I "add" something and pushing myself to have it "done", instead I'll just add to things as I please, and when I feel they are "done", I'll just add them to my front page with the NEW indication.

I notice that this little bit of writing doesn't really belong here. I'll move it later!

Writing process NEW

I would say that my writing process is a bit of a mess. I just tend to write all of the time with no real concern for timelines. That said, I've been working on developing a workflow, especially for non-fiction. This is my basic process:

  1. Research and take notes
  2. Freewrite and outline
  3. Draft
  4. Edit
  5. Proofread
  6. Publish

Yea, you understood that right, I'm trying to do only one major edit of my work, and I try to only spend one day per phase, after the research is done.

Types of writing

I write a lot of different types of things, mainly non-fiction, in terms of output and writing time. I do also write fantasy stories as well. For non-fiction I write both articles and books, though for fiction I focus almost exclusively on novels. Though I used to write a lot of poetry, I generally don't anymore. Not for any particular reason, I think, I just kind of stopped.

Current Manuscript Projects

I work on all my projects at different paces, and since it's a hobby I don't feel any real pressure to finish any time soon. My projects at the moment are:

Visit my books page for more information about my books.