When I began writing novels during NaNoWriMo, I based my writing steps on what my editor had taught me years earlier when developing and writing Lifeliner.
Before my therapist who’d championed my writing and had read every novel, left, she mounted and organized a corkboard on my office wall so that I could see my steps and follow the progression of my novels through all the stages from research to publication.
I replaced it with a glass whiteboard on sale to add elegance to my shabby office. I got some nice dry erase markers and wrote out my steps. Then I lost all support — fucking Ontario governments freezing then cutting community care down to practically nothing for people with brain injury. After all, if we’re 100% unemployable, why spend money on helping us reach the full potential of our functionality. Ammi right? The government attitude sure ain’t. Stupid, I call it. Increasing our support through universal liveable basic income and community care leads to good things for the economy. But Canada hates disability. Anywhooo, this is a post on writing not how awful we’re treated!
After a 9-year wait (yeah, NINE), CHIRS provided me with a case manager. She’s been working with me for over a year. She’s gotten me blogging monthly for Psychology Today, got me started on writing daily regularly for my Mind Explorer Substack newsletter, and gave me the foundation to getting back into fiction writing after 2 years of retrofitting shenanigans and losing my neurodoc had taken me from.
This year, I signed up for writing workshops, a summit, and events, and I attended the relaunched 7-Day Writing Sprint for a few months. Each step drew me back into the writing life.
I finished editing Novel One of my Resurrection trilogy end of May and sent it off to my longtime reader. Last week, she called me 59 pages into it to tell me how much she’s enjoying it and how fascinating it is. She said the dark passages could be long except there’s so much variety that they work.
That lifegiving feedback must’ve brewed in the back of my mind, for this week, I pulled out new dry erase markers and updated my writing steps on my whiteboard. I used colours that spoke to me of the different stages of writing, and I neatened things up. The board is magnetic, but the markers won’t stick to it. That’s OK. I don’t need them stuck on, only that month’s page with key events on. I’m a little on/off updating that page every month, but at least I do it sometimes as opposed to never before this year.
Feeling chuffed and after a discussion with my case manager, today I got my 2-minute treatment of Novel Two out, some foolscap, a pen, and handwrote my scene outline. I did it in less than an hour!
I’d forgotten how I wrote scene outlines until I had looked at my whiteboard and recreated my writing-a-book steps while updating them.
I don’t know if life will toss me out of my fiction writing again, but I’m taking it one goal, one accomplishment at a time.
I still want to update my concussion website, and I want to get back into more regular blogging here. I don’t know how well MailPoet is delivering my newsletter compared to Feedblitz’s reliability; its stats and open rates aren’t as good. But I don’t have the stamina to go back…yet anyway.
