M. Suzanne Terry

Armed with some heavy-duty caffeination, I have used this little holiday break to give myself a writing retreat. I wrote about the overall plan last week on Substack, and it has been pretty great. I am happy to have discovered that churning out content at my copywriting job on a regular basis has made me a more efficient writer and a more decisive editor. The goals I expected to take me two days were finished yesterday.

Specifically, I wanted to get the first chapter of Fishbowl ready to submit to the Page One Prize by next Friday. I am going to read over the edits I made yesterday after this post, but I am pleased with it. I have overhauled this story a lot in the last couple of years, and while there is still work to be done, I like it even better than I did when I first started it so long ago.

My second goal was to complete Andi Cumbo’s Smash the Myths course. I always get so much out of Andi’s gentle advice, and there was a lot in that course I needed to hear. As a result, I’m revamping a few long-term goals and looking at realistic (rather than the idealistic I tend toward) steps to take to get there.

Today, I’m splitting my extra time between reading some of the things on my TBR for the month and working through some prompts from Lisa Carver’s How To Not Write, on loan from Sarah. Highly recommend if you are in a rut and need something to shake you free. What I like most about it is that the prompts can be used for any kind of creative endeavor, not just writing. One of them had me playing some ragtime on the keyboard earlier.

I want to carve out more workdays like this. I forgot how useful they are. I feel productive but also relaxed and refreshed. I’m more excited about writing than I have been in a while. I don’t typically wait around on excitement or motivation to do the work of writing, but I’m so happy when it shows up.