Take Your Time: Reasons Why

I don’t blog much these days.

In fact, A Word or More has changed over the past four years from blogging twice a week to once a week to whenever I can.

Sometimes, I post a poem – written with raw emotion – like my post the other day about the new struggles in raising a child with autism and sometimes I share what I know about writing.

The truth is I’m not worried about the amount of posts I write, the amount of likes I receive, or the attention because blogging should be something we – as writers – enjoy. It should be fun just like our work.  I realize, in getting away from blogging on a schedule and checking every other day, that it is easy to get into the “how to dos” of blogging and miss out on what is most natural for authors.

Maybe I will go two to three months before I post again, but I’m still writing.

• I met my goal of being published once this year. Another story from Adventures of Elliot McSwean was published by Alfie Dog in the UK in January/ February 2015.

 

• I always set a goal of one story per year. I got lucky in previous years because I was published at rate of three stories per year, but I also submitted more and had more time to write different stories  and poems. I am content with one story per year right now.

 

• When I write, I’m putting serious time into three poetic memoirs, or memoirs in verse, because I found the opportunity to improve the original one, Frozen Snowflakes, for possible publication. As I began, I turned a another short memoir into poems instead of essays resembling a prose poetry style.

 

• When I write fiction, Adventures of Elliot McSwean remains the main focus because I plan on going from a middle grades story collection to writing a middle grades novel with Elliot McSwean.

 

• I’m not a patient person except with writing and children. It seems I pour all of my patience into my professions and passions. I’m okay that it takes me years to write or perfect pieces of work. I spent seven and a half years on my manuscript, Sons of the Edisto. Frozen Snowflakes has been around for four years, but it has changed a lot and nearly had some poems published from the collection. And, I will take my anger poem from the other day, and edit it into something more.

 

• Health issues after the birth of my daughter, my son’s diagnosis, family commitments, and the last year of graduate school have all  played a role in when I’m able to write.  I still do.

 

• And, I’m grateful to already meet my goal for 2016. That is, I will be published in February 2016.  An academic work, which I co-wrote and researched, will be published under my regular name: Rebecca D. Bridges.

Don’t worry about being in hurry. It’s okay to write like a turtle and edit like a fox (my personal motto). In other words, it’s okay to write slow, and then edit carefully in a manner of hunting for the weaknesses in your writing.

Take your time.

Rebecca T. Dickinson