Vivian Lovelace is a project leader, writer, and game designer originally from the Magic City of Birmingham, Alabama.

Castaway Winds

Castaway Winds

I’m hoping this month will be a little different. I sorta knew what I wanted to do with this entry for awhile, but I wasn’t sure how exactly I wanted to go about it. What I had in mind was to write freestyle with no target word count or structure other than the few ideas I have bouncing in my head.

Unfortunately, I wouldn’t say I’m writing for fun at this exact moment, but that’s what I had intended to do today. Sometimes with art and junk you have to accept that what you’ve created is different than what you set out with in mind. I’m hoping that as I gather steam the dopamine will start dripping faster. It tends to go that way.

I love writing, but it’s still work and starting is still so often the hardest part.

I think at some point I wanted this entry to be themed around change, but what I couldn’t nail down was the specific sort of change I wanted to articulate. As I alluded to in last month’s entry, I’ve been going about a lot of radical personal change, and I suppose I wanted to focus that in on an entry here. As mentioned, there are a few things I definitely want to express, so I landed on a mode but not a theme. I’m just going to wing it in the general shape of one of these entries.

Right here is where I usually put a segment about my writing updates for the previous month. This was originally one of the main purposes of the blog, to hold myself accountable to progress and share that for public documentation. A lot of that is because writing hasn’t been an easy craft for me to share with people, and that’s of course a really embarrassing thing to admit on the internet, but I don’t plan on being this way forever or for too much longer even.

But I do actually have a few updates this month for such a low-energy entry. Allow me to share what I have this time:

First up, I got a rejection from an agent I was super eager to query for a long while. Not only was the turn around incredibly fast, but she even included a few insights into why she made her decision. I count this as a win simply due to it being a milestone I’m glad to have crossed.

Secondly, I’m super excited to say I’ve completed drafting my fifth novel: Last Show at The Oread - a gothic horror about a band meeting their muses. I think I mostly wrote it to make fun of myself, but maybe that’s not the best way to sell it. I’ve been reflecting on creativity itself recently, and this was probably the overly-introspective product of quarantine. I love it, but I’m excited to work on something refreshing and adventurous and bright - while the summer lasts, that is.

Oh, another thing I wanted to mention is that as of time of writing (but not publishing), it is currently my birthday. Usually I’m closer to the ocean around this time of year, but not this go around. Things seem to keep falling through this year, but I’m undeterred towards making next year better, no matter how much the world has continued to break.

I’ve given myself the past couple days off from writing (though I wrote a bit of junk just for fun), so I’ve used a lot of the intensity and energy I put in writing into focusing on my health - which I haven’t neglected entirely, just that it’s suffered like a few areas of life have during the past year and however many months. Without getting too much into it, I’ve found I miss exercising - it really has helped out quite a bit in the past few weeks, and I’m glad I’ve stuck with the semblance of a routine for a little while. It’s given me a good bit of resilience in a consistently turbulent time.

I guess the only specific change I want to get out of the way concerns this old blog. I like having a blog, I think it’s cool, even if I haven’t put much steam behind making it work towards engagement.  That said, you have to remain ready to call things out when they’re not working. Change or die - I think I’ve stated that here some point recently. It’s sunk in.

Yes, I find having a blog to be mostly cool, I think it helps convey a certain level of commitment at least, but what’s not working has been posting every single month.

It just breaks the longterm project flow, man.

Flow is incredibly important to me and something that I’m working on maintaining boundaries to protect - this includes boundaries with myself.

That said, I’m not planning on taking it easy quite yet, as I never learn a lesson right away, especially when there is meaningless symbolism attached… What I mean is that by October, I’ll have written an entry in this blog every month for three years since it began.

Given that, I’ll continue to post monthly updates just through this October, at which point I’ll change it up to a quarterly or whatever kind of schedule. Perhaps just whenever I have something worth updating?

This is the kind of thing everyone should look out for in their lives - rules you set up for yourself that no longer or never made sense. Don’t keep trying the same thing when it’s not creating benefits that justify the effort. This blog has always been intended to support my journey towards publishing, but if it takes away from that, even a little bit, then something’s gotta change or else the work being put in loses its value.

Kill your darlings, they say. Nothing is sacred, they say. Regardless, don’t overthink, just go with what works.

Anyway, I’m returning to the project I was working on at the beginning of quarantine - it’s a very bright and summery story, so I hope to get a good bit of it updated and polished before the fall comes around, in which case I know what I’ll be working on then. Spoilers, it will involve finally querying a novel I finished years back.

Catch you next month, when we continue on like this conversation never happened.

Another False Binary

Another False Binary

Burning Out on the Fire Inside

Burning Out on the Fire Inside