Hi there, Raminder Kaur - I'm one of the forum moderators, and I want to welcome you to the forum. As this is your first day, I assume you haven't had time to read our Forum Rules or our New Member Quick Start start guide yet. Please do take the time to read them, as they will help keep you on track as to what is and isn't allowed and expected of forum members. I am deleting your poem (except for the title, so the post makes sense) because it violates one of our Rules: You'll see, when you read our New Member Start guide that there are several requirements you must meet before you can use our Workshop. This is to prevent people from joining the forum and immediately asking for feedback. We expect the members to give a few critiques themselves before doing that ...otherwise nobody would ever get any feedback! So please just give yourself time to settle in. If you encounter any problems, feel free to contact me (just 'start a conversation' with me, and I'll do my best to help. This premature posting of work for feedback in the wrong place is a very very common mistake that new members make. Don't let it worry you at all. Just take the time to get settled and then you can post your poem in the Workshop, where we'll be happy to take a look at it. Cheers for now, Jan
Thank you! correct, I have not had time to read the guidelines yet but thank you form letting me know
I see no one's added anything to this for a week or so, and maybe this is redundant, considering what I've written in my Progress Journal. But this lockdown, I find, is exacerbating all my worst habits. Which is not to say I'm not writing, I am. Maybe to excess. But with no school to make me go to bed at night and get up in the morning, no church on Sunday, and being scheduled for my highly-essential (coff! coff!) retail job only two or three evenings a week, it's way too easy to start working on the novel and keep at it and keep at it in a way that's almost manic. I use the can and get snacks and keep the cats fed, otherwise I'm sitting here writing. Doing cycle-back rewriting and fact-checking, mostly, but it's still me at the keyboard. I've gone without sleep for as many as forty hours the last weekend in April, and did a shorter stint, 30 hours maybe, a few days ago. Most of the time, I don't even know what day it is. If it weren't for Kris Rusch's business blog coming out late on Wednesdays and my having to put the trash out for pick up Thursday nights, I'd likely lose track altogether. If I had any sense, I'd be scared. The good thing is that I'm making progress. I've corrected the problems left over from my NaNoWriMo vomit-it-out session last November, and most everything from here on will be new words. The ideas are coming, and I'm telling myself that once I have a whole first draft to send off to my beta readers, the write-without-stopping compulsion will end and I can get my schedule under control.
I'm actually writing about disease in my chapters, so the coronavirus works perfectly. I've even added that virus in my science fiction. I'm sorry for those of you who have been severely affected by the disease. My prayers go towards your quick recovery.
Be sure to get some exercise, if only enough to get your blood flowing and heart rate up. We have an exercise bike, and I try to use it several times a week.
Somehow all I'm creating now seems to be COVID parodies of songs: (Locomotion) Everybody's learning a brand new dance now (Come on, baby, do the Social Distance) It's gonna lick this virus if we give it a chance now (Come on, baby, do the Social Distance) It tells me that you're caring and you're really smart And all you have to do is stay six feet apart So come on baby, do the social distance with me (I Saw Her Standing there) It's COVID-19 I'm in quarantine And the way it looks, I'll be here a while I should have stayed home with you, babe OOOOO But I can't resist a smile She looked at me And she seemed virus free And I never knew she'd come back from a cruise She came back home with a fever OOOOOO And that's why I sing these blues Well, I sealed my doom When I crossed that room And I held her hand in mine OOOOO We danced through the night And we held each other tight And before too long, I was infected, too If I had the brains of a doorknob OOOOO I'd have stayed at home with you. (Apologies to Carole King and Sir Paul.)
I saw her face (now i'm a believer) I thought the pandemic was just a fairy tale Meant for someone else but not for me The police was out to get me That's the way it seemed Never thought i'd end up in fkin quarantine Then I licked her face, now I've got a fever Not a trace, of doubt in my mind I'm a twat, and I've a disease, yeah I couldn't get out of bed if I tried I thought covid was more or less a giving thing The more I gave the less friends I got, yeah What's the use in tryin' All you get is pain When I wanted sunshine I got rain
Yeah, but when I finally get to bed, I sleep for eleven or twelve hours. I'm either going and going, or I'm totally inert.
So true. I've got a nice stretch along the river I could walk, if I would get out of bed before 3:00 in the afternoon.
I wouldn't worry about this. It's quite common for creative people of all kinds to be manic, even obsessive, for periods of time. A few weeks of irregular hours and meals won't do you permanent harm, so long as you're not taking any lethal substances (by which I probably mean, worse than coffee, alcohol and pot). As long as you're making progress and not beating yourself up in frustration, it'll be all right. The worst part is coming down suddenly, before you've done the intended work. The biggest risk is, when you come down, being dissatisfied with what you're done.
Writing is the furthest thing from my mind. I'm just trying to survive with some semblance of sanity at this point. I've been out of work for 8 weeks, I've lost all my mortgage pre-approvals for the house we were about to buy, my wife caught the virus from work (she's an RN in a nursing home), her facility is probably shutting down because, you know, most of the residents are dead or dying, I was placed on 14 day isolation after direct exposure (and never got so much as a sniffle, because you know, whiskey and cigarettes kill everything), restaurants aren't opening any time soon, meat is about to run out... So yeah, fuck writing... I'm a positive person, but this is trying my patience.
OK, here's my quick and dirty COVID19 parody, ripped off the song "Baby, It's You," written by the Shirelles and covered by Smith, the Beatles, etc: It’s not the symptoms list That froze my heart, It’s more the way you spread That keeps us apart. Many, many, many nights go by I sit at home alone and cry ’Cause of you. What can I do? Just want somebody, somebody— But COVID, there’s you. Is it true what they say about you? They say you’ll never, never, never be through. It doesn’t matter what they say, I wanna go out maskless any old way Like I used to do, But it’s true Can’t hug nobody, nobody— ’Cause COVID, there’s you. Let me alone, Let me leave my home, COVID, it’s you . . .
Covid-19 has been detrimental to my people-watching time. I've always gotten a lot of ideas from people watching.
I've been dealing with a lot lately and seem to have thrown myself into writing more so than ever. I try to do an hour (at least) each night after I get home from work. Alas, I'm dreaming of the day where I sit outside mask free and write in the sun! - the perks of a city flat. At least I'm on track to get my latest book finished - well if cabin fever doesn't get me first that is.
There's always going to be an excuse not to write. Too much time to think! Too little time to think! Too much work to do! Not enough work so we're not 'connected' to normal life! It never ends. Sometimes I think if I had true passion for it, I wouldn't have thoughts like this. Do I really think like this when I do things I truly enjoy? What the hell do I enjoy? Excuses excuses excuses. If the passion was truly there, wouldn't you just do it? Salinger wrote 'Catcher' while in service during world war 2 for God's sake. He had every excuse in the world not to write. And John Grisham wrote while doing 70 hour work weeks as a lawyer. And whenever you do write there's always going to be a competing voice in your head arguing that what you're doing isn't good enough or what you should be doing. Write about covid and you're some hack writing too much about topical events. Don't write about it and you're living in a cocoon from reality writing lame indulgent escapist fantasy. Ah who cares. Just do nothing. Watch a movie. Except you can't enjoy any movies since they're all stories and painful reminders that other humans have gotten over their ennui to create works of art.
If you didn't have these concerns, you wouldn't be a writer. These are things that writers think. If you get a chance, read Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. It's a handy little writing manual all around, but it deals with common writers' anxiety in humerus and helpful ways.
I often think about what the great rock bands had to go through in order to make it, through the dark days. Kansas lived in a 'band house', them and all their equipment, on a dollar a day average for each of them. They said the ones who smoked either quit or found alternative methods to procure cigarettes. They still practiced all the time and kept writing songs, managed to land a gig at a local bar and printed up flyers saying FREE BEER at the top, and music by Kansas much smaller underneath. They charged at the door, used the money to pay for the beer, and made no money at all, in fact I think they ended up owing the bar. But the publicity it generated brought an agent of Don Kirschner, who liked that there was a Hell's Angel looking dude playing a violin, and signed them. And then there was Judas Priest, living in a van by the river and starving, constantly being told by the police they have to move the van, and yet still practicing and writing songs all the time. They had already released a couple of albums, but while in the van they created Sad Wings of Destiny, their most ambitious one (progressive metal actually, which they had never done before). They kept asking their record company for some money, but the record company was broke and couldn't help them, until they released Sad Wings and that one did it for them.
I've not really written anything new, despite wanting to work on book two of my WIP. I had to deal with university going online for the last half of the spring term, and, much like being at university, I simply did not have time to write. And now I have the summer term in which I'm taking 12 credits, so yeah... The plus side is that one of my summer classes is a creative writing fiction class, so at least I will get some time to write, even if it is just for class. I had about two weeks of break in between spring and summer term, and I used that time to go through line edits of book one. So, I might not have written anything new, but I did get some writing stuff done with what time I had.
Being quarantined gives me the perfect excuse to write! Can't go anywhere... might as well write! I'm also finding it great as a way to deal with stress and processing all of the world's events right now.
I totally agree on that! I was able to write so much during quarantine and it was also a good method to "order" my feelings...I mean of course this was something really special and actually historical...it sometimes felt like a movie or a novel and I was really curious about the whole situation...But now I'm starting to get bored...
I have pretty much taken a break from writing but I have rediscovered reading. Now I remember how much I love it, need it and how much it helps me and my writing. I intend to keep reading till my eyes fall out. Well, you know what I mean.
I hadn’t written a word since 2015 and have done 2 and a half novel first drafts and three short stories since lockdown began. it’s been an absolute trial with a 11 month old boy at home.
