Hello! I have another writing update for you today.
I got so many new followers this week, so thank-you and welcome! If you’re new here, I post writing updates as well as bookish content. The writing updates started as a way for me to hold myself accountable and to keep writing. This has both worked and not worked over the months I have started doing this, but ultimately I do think it has been helping me. If you wanted to catch up on my older writing updates, you can find them all here: Past Writing Updates.
On my last writing update, I spoke about how I was changing course. I had more inspiration for writing poetry than for fiction or working on my Rapunzel retelling. However, this was not completely the truth. If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen me venting about technology; more specifically how my new computer arrived faulty.
For those of you who have been here for a while, you might remember an old writing update where I spoke about some issues I was having with my laptop – I think I called it something like Rewrite Drama. My laptop kept crashing, it kept removing documents or saving them under new names, and it kept coming up with all sorts of error codes. At this point, my keyboard had already stopped working and I was using a USB keyboard. It was becoming clearer and clearer that I needed to do something about this.
So, in the middle of July (14th, to be exact), I ordered a new computer. I wanted a desktop computer this time around, and preferably two monitors. My dad and I found a refurbished package that was in my price range and it all seemed perfect, it said that it would be with us in two weeks, everything would be okay.
So, I didn’t do any fiction writing during this time. I didn’t do much of any writing at all to be honest. I saw this time as a final break before I could finally crack on.
Two weeks roll around: no computer. We contact them, they tell us it will come soon. Anyway, it finally arrives on 10th August. I am so excited. I am finally seeing an end to all of my technology problems. I start setting the computer up and then start casually using it, trying to move documents across when I hit the three hour mark of the computer being on, it froze and made a buzzing noise. I was forced to turn it off, and then it wouldn’t turn on. We immediately contacted them. After a few hours of letting it be, I tried it again and managed to get it back on, however after three hours it did the exact same thing.
We contact them again on the same day as the delivery. We don’t hear a response until the 17th. At this point I am so frustrated. I wanted them to send out a new product completely, and I would return the faulty one on its arrival; however they seemed to ignore the majority of my email. It was picked up on the 20th and now I am just hoping that they will repair it and send it back quickly. However, I don’t have high hopes.
Despite my technology issues, I managed to load my laptop up (it took 45 minutes for it to turn on and load up the documents I needed) and on one day I wrote 2,202 words and on the other I wrote 741 words. It felt so good to work on this project again and I can’t wait until I can properly sit down and work on this again. The 2.2k day was my highest word count in a day since starting on my rewrite which is also really encouraging! This week I have a few days off in a row from work, so hopefully I can continue working on this and finally get this project properly in motion.
My original goal for this rewrite was to finish it by the end of October. I have finally admitted to myself that this is just not going to happen for me. It has taken me a long time to admit this to myself – I like setting goals and hitting them. It is hard for me not to hit them and to not feel disappointed with myself. However, I need to recognise that I have gone a couple of months of barely writing anything at all and that is definitely impacting the progression of the story. I have now extended this to the end of the year and I am hoping that I will be able to reach this goal.
Even though I haven’t been writing too much fiction lately, I have still been working on my poetry. I document a lot of my life and dips in my mental health through poetry. I have been having a little dip in my mental health recently – particularly my anxiety and dermatillomania. I am okay, and it is definitely not as bad as it has been in the past, but it does mean I have gotten some great pieces of poetry out of it.
Between the 28th July and the 18th August, I wrote 26 poems. It’s the most I have written in such a short period of time, since probably my university days. I also went through my past poetry notebooks and tried to edit them or rewrite them with new emotions and experiences since the years I wrote them. I spent a lot of the time reflecting and trying to figure out how the piece can also now work with how I am feeling now too. It was a really interesting experience and I plan on continuing to do this!
I know this was quite a long post about me just ranting about technology, so sorry about that! Hopefully the next time I update you, I will have a bit more encouraging news to share.
Let me know in the comments how your writing is going!
Kira Jeanette 
Well- Tale of the Cattail Forest made it to the sixth draft, and I did some work on it
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That’s brilliant!
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