Finished My Collection and Injecting the Reason I Write #barrioblues

I have to be more disciplined about sticking to my writing schedule. These last two weeks, I spent a lot of time focusing on presenting the faculty contract at other colleges, then decompressing.  The decompressing has been somewhat paralyzing.  Plus, I am not able to get up at 3a.m. like I used to, but I do want to hit my writing every day.  However, when I am not writing, I am thinking about my work.

On my birthday, I finished my short story collection. Lately, I've been re-imagining the titles of the stories in it, to shorter punchier titles that really deal with the meaning of the stories, and I hope to revise the last story and send it to the beta reader, since I have some time to focus on that story this holiday weekend. 

I have also been thinking a lot about my novel, The Harvest.  I'm not too crazy about transforming the women into cat-like creatures.  What I am interested in is genetically engineering them so that they are stronger and more beautiful, at least by their social standards.  In truth, that won't take too much rewriting.  I also realize that I need to play up the thread that keeps the reader interested.  The Harvest has to be a constant thread the protagonist wants to discover.

So, this weekend, I took my students to a leadership conference, and I went to a motivational speaker.  He gave a lot of great bits of advice, but one thing that stuck is that you can have dreams and excuses, but you can't have both.  He also talked about taking small steps and doing better the next day than the previous day, which sounds like typical business motivational speak, but all the advice was useful.  Still, he did ask us to find what kept us motivated.  Mine is still to craft beautiful stories and writes something I could sink myself into.

It sounds easy enough, but it's not.  That takes a lot of work, but not mountains.  Anyway, I do like this last collection very much; I just want every story to be fucking brilliant, but that doesn't happen overnight.  It takes hard consistent work and doing better each day. 

Remember why you love to write, and take one step at a time. #barriobules