Long time no post. It’s been a ridiculously busy year so far, and sadly, due to the mountain of work, I haven’t been writing nearly as much as I’d like. I joined Camp Nanowrimo with the intent to get lots of my novel revised, but alas, I’ve had to conserve energy for self-care and such. I think Camp Nano would have worked if I’d been producing a zero draft, but revision requires a whole other level of abstract thought and above all, decisions.

But I have been doing a little bit of revision – so the project of revising the novel I (re)wrote last November has been started, at least. I’ve imported the draft into Scrivener, made notes and pondered things quite a lot even if I haven’t got very far. I mostly have questions instead of answers at this point! But it’s a start. I’m trying to think positive instead of feeling horribly disappointed in myself. But really, April has been ridic. I’m trying to think more along the lines of “I deserve a medal for not utterly collapsing so far in 2016”, so I shouldn’t beat myself up for not managing to do epic amounts of novel revision at the same time as a trillion other things.

Luckily, many of the busy things that have eaten up my time and energy this semester have now wound down. And now, I’m taking a four-day holiday before plunging into funded PhD work (yay!). I really need a break, even if it’s short!

I spent this morning reading some of Becky Chambers’ A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (around 80 pages in, it has utterly charmed me! I hope the rest is as good!). My main plan for today (and the rest of the holiday, really) is to write. Actual writing! Yaaay! I just did a writing exercise – five hand-written pages describing a fictional wine – and now for novel revision, because hey, every little helps. I also have a few short stories I could work on. And perhaps could jog my brain into poem mode too?

So my idea of the best thing to do on a holiday is to write. 😀 It’s (mostly) not like work, I swear! Having had so little energy to write has sucked. Lack of writing has been gnawing at me like it always does: I feel bad when I don’t write, I feel like something’s missing. But now, four days to basically just write fiction is making me feel so excited! Writing is one of my favourite things to do even though I am gearing up more towards the pro side of it so it’s less of a simple hobby than it used to be. So this totally counts as relaxing as long as I’m having fun, right? Other plans: lots of sleep, some fun socialising, and a lot of reading. I hope this tiny holiday manages to get my brain out of stress mode for a bit!