A Little Help

There’s nothing embarrassing about needing a little help. I know this, and I try to internalize this, but sometimes (like most humans) I struggle. ​

For example, I enjoy getting gifts from friends and family, but I still have a certain amount of guilt that someone used their own money on me. It’s the same as when I go shopping with my mother and if I only have one or two things, she’ll almost always buy them for me. Of course I appreciate this. She’s my mom and an amazing person in general, but still, I hate feeling like a charity case when it comes to any aspect of my life. I assume because of my height (a measly 5’2”) and gender most people see me as fragile or weak. An acting teacher once told me that it’s very easy for people to pity me when I’m performing something sad onstage. I’m still not sure if that was entirely a compliment.

Is this all irrational? Probably. But I’m stubborn and enjoy being independent and in control of myself in any limited way I can.

Still, I’m getting a little more open to the idea that I’m not just living in a vacuum. One area I want to stretch myself in is writing. Now, I think the multitudes of research and reference books out there for writers are ridiculously helpful, and I usually use them. What I don’t use though are prompt generators, plot suggestions from blog posts, or any type of extremely useful exercise that already has a pre-planned concept attached.
For some reason I’ve always felt that those things weren’t sincere. I liked getting all of my ideas from my own, strange brain, without the help from an online prompt or the ever popular “writer’s notebook” filled with various plots, genres, and characters.

But, again, that thinking is kind of ridiculous when I don’t technically get my ideas just from my head. I usually get them from news stories, real events or moments in my life, and a lot of other entertainment sources that inspire me. Every idea I have is an amalgamation of everything I see, feel, hear, or taste at any given moment. Just because the prompt has already been written doesn’t mean I’ll follow it the same way someone else does, so I want to branch out.

At Christmas, a dear friend of mine bought me a journal (pictured above). I haven’t really written in yet because of my trepidation, but now that I’m a little more open to some writing help, I kind of can’t wait to dive in. As you can see below, each page has a prompt and a number of words you should use within the story. Now the space in the journal is pretty limited for writing, but also adds the extra challenge of getting a complete story out in under a page, and I kind of like that challenge.

Not only can I gain some, much needed, flash fiction experience, but I also don’t have to constantly prompt myself when freewriting. If I’m stuck, I can go to any page in that journal and immediately start.
 So thank you again, Riley! I can’t wait to use the notebook, and don’t all of you be surprised if the next few Freewrite Fridays includes a couple of prompts from it.

Now, on a different note, it’s update time!

The next few months are going to be hectic (as they usually are), so the regularity of my posting will probably be erratic at best. I’m apologizing in advance because I know myself.

I am trying to actively use different social media sites to promote both the website and blog, so there will probably be more tinkering in the upcoming months to this platform and all of my other platforms. I especially want to make this site a little more mobile friendly and polished as I go on.

Also, next month is the Camp NaNoWriMo, and I am going to participate this year, but I want to do it a little differently. Instead of focusing on one project, I basically want to write 50,000 words worth of short stories.
Why, the invisible audience asks? Well, in the Fall I will start to release my short work on Wattpad and/or some other sites like it, and to make that process a little easier I want a bigger and stronger catalogue of stories to pull from. I probably won’t post these stories, fully, on this blog, but I will add another page to this site that will direct you to wherever I’ll be publishing my work.

In the meantime, I have some great news that I’m basically bursting to share with you about a few projects that I’m involved in (both writing and theater), but I have to wait a little while until I can fully divulge what’s going on.
​
So stick around, dear reader(s), a lot of exciting things are coming this summer!

---