The tricky part about calling anything “of the month” is that it creates the expectation that the months that follow will also get their own thing. My theme for January was about celebrating every accomplishment. In February, I was encouraged to just start, even if I “should have” started sooner. My theme for March was persistence. In April, I recognized I don’t give myself enough grace when I can’t meet my own (sometimes unreasonable) expectations. My theme for May was intentional gratitude, especially in times of heaviness and disappointment.
I started thinking about my Theme of the Month for June relatively early. Over a couple weeks, I compiled concepts and phrases that I thought might make a throughline in my memories of this month. Despite this preparation, when the time came to actually draft this post, almost none of the items on my list resonated anymore. Forget a theme of the month, each week of June seemed to have a different theme. In fact, I was so frustrated while drafting this post that I gave some thought to delaying my June Theme of the Month until next Wednesday. June is barely in the rearview mirror. Maybe I just need more time to think and reflect.
Going into June, I set out to create a practice of intentional gratitude and to focus more on the good things in my life. No thing was too small, mundane, simple, or humble to be appreciated. Among other things, I wrote that I was grateful for home, books, family, friends, my favorite tea, color, dreams, electricity, music, hot water, fresh summer fruit, the passage of time, watching the Stanley Cup Final. This practice helped counterbalance the frustrations in my writing life. I’m happiest when I’m writing; it’s hard for me when the writing gets hard.
I’ve shared a little of the struggles I’ve had recently in my writing life. I’ve experienced a lot of resistance, particularly with the first draft of a new novel. I’m excited about the story, I want to write it, and yet something is holding me back, and I’m still exploring it, working through it, coping with it, parsing out the root cause beneath the symptoms.
In response to this resistance, a couple weeks ago, I shared that I was pivoting, setting aside the unfinished novel draft.
I was loathe to do it. The common advice to write a first draft as quickly as possible then set it aside for a time before revisiting it is advice I like. I tend to write rather long first drafts, and I avoid deleting much of anything—sometimes the first draft contains multiple attempts at a single paragraph or conversation or chapter, excessive descriptions, more characters than I actually need. The first draft fluff is cut or completely rewritten in subsequent drafts, but it exists to give my future self more to work with. For me, half the pleasure of every post-first-draft is trimming the story down, streamlining it, and creating simpler yet elegant sentences that inspire the imagination of my reader to fill in the gaps.
So, when I deliberately tucked my unfinished novel draft into the metaphorical drawer, at first, I felt nervous and a bit guilty. If I’m away from a story world a little too long, I fear I’ll lose its unique rhythm, the direction I thought I was going, my passion for it, and all momentum. What helped me get over my fears was making significant progress on other projects.
I revised two short stories and submitted one of them to a contest. After some additional research, I hope to submit the second story (and a third that was recently rejected) somewhere else soon.
A couple days ago, when I was wide awake in the middle of a restless night, I thought about this post and themes for June. Sometime after that train of thought stalled, my brain changed the subject. I found myself thinking about a novel I’d written, one that I thought I’d finished and was nearly ready to query. I mentally reworked the first chapter then penned nearly-illegible notes on the back of a receipt—the nearest paper I had to hand at the time—fearing that I’d forget the breakthrough before I could commit it to better paper or a Word document. By some miracle, I could read most of my writing and the ideas still made sense in the morning.
June was full of side quests and ups and downs, but maybe there is a throughline after all; maybe there is a theme. Looking back, I see that I conducted little experiments throughout the month: my intentional gratitude practice, setting aside a stalled project when I’d normally white-knuckle through it trying to make it work, writing and revising short stories, exploring new thoughts on an old novel. I’m surprised and grateful for the success of these little experiments. Perhaps I will conduct another experiment or two in July. Will you join me?
I’ll keep you posted on my writing life and pursuit of publication, and as always, LET’S GO PIOS! GO AVS GO!
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