Bron Rauk-Mitchell's Blog: Bron Rauk-Mitchell - Journal

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What to do with the bunch of posts sitting in the drafts? Trash them, publish them, or leave them be? How about we scoop them up into one post – one post where you can track my mood as I sunk further into a depressive state. I was trying so hard to fulfil the challenges of blogging a book, while wrestling with my recovery, my demons, and a growing sense of alienation.

On one hand it would be far kinder to put these entries out of their misery – but on the other it’s still a part of the process, part of the recovery journey, and 2017 Bron was doing their best to build an audience, connect with readers and writers, and just to feel like someone cared enough about the process, so it feels cruel to throw all of these notes away.

I’ve made just a couple of tweaks to some of the entries … most are as is. These are all from April 2017.

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Day 6 – short n sweet:

Where #BYBin30 and #campnanowrimo were concerned, short and sweet was the order of today. My energy levels were low and I wasn’t able to spend a lot of time on P.C.T.A and “This is NOT a Fairy Tale”; although I did reach 600 words for #campnanowrimo, which puts me at just over 10% of my goal wordcount for the month.

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Day 7:

I settled on the  name of the book.
I have an idea of the cover.
I’m continuing to read through faerie tales to make sense of manuscript.

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Day 8: [It was almost written as a poem – so I tweaked it just a little, to make it more poem-like. lol]

Today was a day!

An emotional day!

A day when the urge to write is strong but the concentration was lacking.

Do i force myself to write?

Do i throw myself into research?

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Day 9 :

I worked on the story of pussycat … working out a few more details. And I played around with a few new character ideas for NAFT. And topped it off with more writing and editing.

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Day 13 – short n sweet:

new story idea for not a fairy tale
some more words
began writing on pcta

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Day 14:

More of the posts remain as drafts as the moment. It’s not the daily blogging that is an issue; I could blog every day about my writing but as I’ve signed up to blog about one book in particular, for #BYBin30, and [the post ended abruptlu and jumped into point form].

more writing for pctamore for fairy takemore general writing

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Day 14:

slow progress on both stories[this has gotta be the saddest and yet somewhat still inspiring draft from this time!]

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Day 16:

tough day for writing but made made it over the 2500 mark

researching the french revolution and the great cat massacre

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Day 17:

a tough day

i struggled

some writing
some new ideas
some research

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Day 19:

starting to make more progress. by the end of the month both books will have moved forward significantly.

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Day 23 – struggling but still here!  [That title says it all, really!]

I’m still plodding along – making some progress on Not a Fairy Tale (NAFT), and doing more research for the Pussycat Through the Ages (PCTA) … and tweaking important details for the latter.

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These updates are more painful than inspiring – which is why I guess they sat in the drafts for so long. It didn’t take long for me to slip back into the mindset from that time … and so much hasn’t changed in a lot of ways. Still trying to share my process, while in recovery and fighting my demons, and feeling alienated! But that brings us to the end of this stroll – or stumble – down memory lane. Don’t forget to leave a review for the tour on yelp  

 

This is gunna be quick. I’m still here. I’ve been quiet as I’ve been recovering from a couple of surgical procedures but I wanted to finally share that I reached 40 k for NaNoWriMo over the weekend … that is something that I haven’t done in all my years of attempts. Yay me!

And I’m absolutely loving the 4thewords.com. I’m finding it’s a great way to stay focused, keep track of my various projects, and have a little fun along the way. Now if I can find a site like it for the rest of the stuff I want to keep on top of.

As far as I know this is the first time that I’ve unlocked this badge. In theory I should have had no problems reaching 50 k doing it rebel style before – but something always slowed me down and got in the way of  achieving that goal.

But here I am 8 days in and I’ve breached 25 k. I guess having had the year that I’ve had – having to withdraw last minute from Uni subjects and falling behind, turning down invitations, skipping the monologue competitions, and more, thanks to medical shit – i just gagged my inner critics and courted the words with all of my best moves.

I already knew that anything that I achieved would be more than I started with and this time it didn’t feel like i was deluding myself – cause I haven’t even had the spoons to write much over the past few months or so. I’ve barely created any art – so any words, any progress that I could make towards any of my writing projects, was a gift for future me.

I wasn’t sure about including the words that I’m copying over from notebooks and scrap pieces of paper in my tally, but it was a good move. It’s an arduous job but this gives me more incentive to stick with it, and I’m finding a bunch of lost treasures, as well as adding new notes as I go along, and I have found a little of my spark hidden in those pages.

When I hit a wall on one of my projects it helps to jump into this task, as I’m still writing, still ticking of one of my goals for the year, and it gets the juices flowing again. And in between that I’m also journaling – which is helping me to sort through the jumble of thoughts that has made it hard to focus on writing for far too long this year.

I may not get much further past this 25 k but if I can pour some of this sputtering spark into my upcoming Uni assignments I may just make it through this upcoming session!  Fingers crossed!

Almost 20 000 words (perhaps I’ll reach that by the end of this post), and a 7 day streak! *insert wolf whistle cause I’m immature at times*. This is far more than I had hoped to achieve. I had hoped to maybe be at around 7000 words … just get something under my belt so that I didn’t have to look at a long list of failures this year.

Yes, I know. There were mitigating circumstances … but the thing is, for me, they still rate as failures. I probably have to work on that a little more through therapy – but let’s not dwell on that tonight.

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me

To help try to regain a little focus I finally decided to utilise 2 accounts that I had created some time ago – one was to keep track of writing and one to keep track of routines etc. The writing one is the one I’m gunna get into here – it’s called 4thewords, and I’d forgotten about the account until I received emails from them with NaNoWriMo being on. So I headed over and reactivated my account. I’ll only be able to use it for this month – at this stage – but I plan to get the most out of it.

Basically, it’s a game, and a community, and there are challenges for writing, and you can win rewards. [I’m not doing it justice as I’m ready to go meet the sandman, but maybe go have a look and see what the fuss is about for yourself!]. Boy, does that deliver the dopamine! And I’m severely lacking in that apartment.

So, if you like to write, and you like to do quests etc, why not go over to 4thewords.com and sign up. Please be sure to use my referral code – HZBZR57645 – cause I wanna earn some crystals!  Anyway … if I don’t make 20 000 tonight with this post, I’ll make it early tomorrow with something else.

It was only a matter of time before I ran outta steam … I am still dealing with a medical situation that is taking a lot out of me after all, and some of the more serious symptoms are back.  So, for the past couple of days I’ve run out of steam sooner than I like. But I still made today’s goal and I am now closer to the halfway point, than I am to the starting point (just). And I lost myself in one of my writing tasks today – that kind of focus hasn’t been easy to achieve since this medical stuff started, so I didn’t want to break the spell – but interruptions happen and I eventually lost that momentum. But I enjoyed having that focus for a change.

[image error]So what held my focus? I was copying over more of my notes from the still-not-shrinking-fast-enough pile of notebooks and papers, and a large section was related to The Crush … a book that I started 20-odd years ago, and that I have returned to over a few NaNoWriMo sessions.

It wasn’t just copying over the notes that held my attention. It was mentally running through the issues that have prevented me from finishing the story – at least in recent year. Once more I have too many options for the story and it has become super-complicated in many ways. I have scrapped this story many times and started fresh … but I always end up at the same point, and the story stalls.

The original idea was simple – probably too simple. And my writing was very naive, as I hadn’t found my voice so was writing in a borrowed style. I’m actually glad that having a toddler to chase after distracted me, because what I was writing at the time was complete tosh! But while I have copious notes, character descriptions, some research, and several chapters under my belt, it still is lacking something. And everytime I think i find the missing piece it stalls.

But I love the story too much to give up on it. So I was absorbed by the task, by the notes themselves, and by my mental analysis of the story and its flaws. It would be wonderful to tie up a full rough draft for this story during this NaNoWriMo. For now, I’ll just continue to slowly chip away at the smaller stories that need completed drafts.

Most of the time when I go through my notes, drafts, and ideas it doesn’t take long to refresh my memory about an idea, a story, or a character. But Sarah 13 has me stumped. I spent more time today copying some scrawled notes over to the computer, and there was Sarah 13. There were a few short passages – buit there was njo mention of a Sarah. I remember where I was when I wrote the passage, and I remember part of what inspired the passage, which was a dapper dressed gentleman waiting for a bus, no concern for the mayhem around him, and I remeber roughly when I wrote the passage  (I’ve developed a habit in the past 5 years of dating my work but this one had no date), but I only have vague storrings about what Sarah 13 is.

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[image error]Tonight I reached the first 10 000 words down! I know I won’t be able to keep the up the pace with Uni starting back soon … but I’m happy with my progress for NaNoWriMo so far. After months of medical dramas that have been sucking everything out of me, I’ve only had the odd stretches of time where I am truly focused and not struggling with whatever task that I have before me – so it’s been great that I’ve been able to focus a little more during these past few days. It’s most likely to do with the fact that I’m not dealing with the worst of the symptoms at the moment, so my body is having a rest. Whatever it is, I have welcomed these small stretches of time to focus on a few things – such as my writing.

One thing that I’m doing with NaNo this time is copying over some of my piles of scrawled handwritten notes to my computer. While doing that today, I came across an early draft for a book, Mum’s Pockets, that I started work on earlier in the year. Reading over that first draft filled me with excitement again – and I could visualise the illustrations that would go well with the book. If I can hire the right artist, it would be a very pretty book …

Mum’s Pockets is a humorous story for kids; loosely (very loosely) based on myself. When I wrote the first rough draft, I couldn’t decide which of 2 endings to go with … but after consulting with my youngest this afternoon, I found a way that I should be able to combine both ideas. So now I (pretty much) have my ending. Again, I made a mock-cover for this … and again it’s nothing like what I imagine for the published book, but it’s a good stand in. Made in Canva, with additional graphics purchased from Creative Fabrica.

Here’s a snippet from the draft:

Mum’s pockets are magic … or at least that’s what she tells us. You’d be surprised at just how much they can hold – and at what treasures she finds inside them. It doesn’t matter what we need, she always seems to have it, just there inside her pockets. She has never lost a treasure, once it’s inside those magic pockets … well, not until today, that is!

So, what’s the silliest thing that you’d expect to find in someone’s pockets? What’s the weirdest thing you’ve found in someone’s pockets? And lastly, can you ever really have enough pockets?

[image error]This morning, Lucy and Sam finally revealed themselves to me … this isn’t exactly an accurate picture of what they look like but for now it’s pretty close! And it beats my original scribbles when I did my best to capture everything that they’d shown me. As my drawing skills weren’t up to the task, I had to play around with a couple of avatar creators to see what I could create fow now. The one that I was happiest with was the one at pixton.com. And then I went one step further, popping over to canva.com, to make a very rough mock-cover for the book – sometimes a mock-cover, even a rough one, can bring the story one step closer to feeling like a reality.

Up until this morning, they had only revealed their personalities, some likes and dislikes, and some of the things they feared. But I guess they were happy that I was working on their story again, so they popped out to say “hi!”.  I made a little more progress with the book – I’ll need to write more pieces than I thought I would, just to fill in some gaps and tie everything together, but for now I’m working on some new pieces for the ending.

Expect to see a little more of Lucy and Sam in the coming days.

Day 2 of NanoWriMo is going strong … I’ve already clocked over 5000 words over the two days. I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to keep the momentum up, but getting the words down is what matters to me, and already having 5000 words down across various projects is better than no words on any of them! I mean, it’s a no-brainer really, but sometimes we lose sight of that when chasing some specific goals, or at least I do!

After many months, I resumed work on Lucy and Sam ; an illustrated book for kids, written entirely in haikus. It’s fun. It’s silly. Filled with repetition, alliteration, rhyme, and onomatopoeia. One of the short books that I used to read to my youngest son: Bim Bam Boom! By: Margaret Wild and Wayne Harris (illustrator), inspired me to write Lucy and Sam . For anyone that is familiar with my poetry, I tend to favour free-verse poetry, but I’ve been known to write other styles of poetry, and this has been an absolute joy to write. I just haven’t been in the right head space to finish that first complete draft. But tonight, I resumed work on it, and I’m feeling inspired to complete the draft this month.

This is one of the pieces from the book that I did last year … it also stands nicely on it’s own. I tried to make as many of the poems as I could also stand on their own, but it wasn’t possible for every piece. I love sunflowers, so this is one of my fav pieces from the book.

I will be sharing the completed draft with my brains trust … I’ll be interested to see how it’s received by adults and kids alike. But for now, I have to finish the draft – I think it only needs a handful of poems to tie all the bits together, at least that’s the hope.