Progress Check: 11,000 Words & Seasonal Depression!

In which: Maggie waxes philosophical about seasonal affective disorder, word counts, and badass female writers.

It’s been a looooooong four weeks, y’all. I went to Mexico, I managed the school (mostly) on my own multiple times, I had a health scare for my dog, I wrote 11,000 words, and I’m still kickin’ although these Maryland winters make me want to crawl into bed and never speak to another human ever again.

So, y’know, normal life.

YLWP is going well, with a few caveats — I did absolutely no writing while I was in Mexico, which was great because it allowed me to focus on my family and the vacation, but less-than-great because it put me behind on word count and I had to do a crazy 6,000-word weekend to get caught up. (And I’m behind again this week because — YAY — seasonal affective disorder! But I’m working on it. I was technically supposed to hit 14,000 by yesterday, but I’m hoping to get in some good scribbles today at the school, now that I’ve figured out how to multitask. More on that later.)

Class got cancelled last week because our instructor was sick, and I’ll admit I spent pretty much the whole week playing video games and sleeping since that seems to be what I do these days.

BUT! The fact that I’m here typing this up and thinkin’ real hard about next steps means I’m hopefully on my way out of this slump. It’s the end of February, which means we should start seeing nicer weather in the next month or so and hopefully I won’t feel quite as murder-y anymore. (Dear NSA: I am not actually murder-y, it’s just the vibe of Maryland winters. You get it because you’re headquartered here and have to deal with it too.)

I’m going into the school early today to design our mid-season show poster, which I’m actually super excited about! I love doing little design projects like that and I’ve been seeing some of the examples from our other locations and they all look really good. So here’s hopin’ I can put my Canva skills to the test and make something really good as my first foray into designing for the school.

I’ve had an aggressive travel bug this week — I think it’s the weather. I’m really missing the West a lot more than I thought I would, especially the mountains and the snow. It’s been coming out in my writing too, as I’ve been making the island a lot more mountainous and rocky, modeling parts of it after the parks I loved in Salt Lake. And the underwater rivers from Xcaret — a place my family went in Mexico — are definitely going to make an appearance (and be a major plot point, actually).

It’ll be fun to look back on these posts at the end of the year and see where my brain was at while planning major things in the story. I’m being intentionally vague about it because I’m not ready to share anything concrete with anyone, but it’s nearly my turn to workshop (GULP!) so I gotta get serious about at least some of the preliminary plot points if I want to be ready with my first 25 pages by mid-March.

Even though I practically took another full week off, I’m feeling good about where I’m at with the story. A lot more of it is becoming clear, and it’s always nice when those nagging little bits of plot start to fit together coherently.

I’ve always felt kind of “meh” about getting squished into a box in terms of genre writing. I don’t really want my name to be associated with one genre over another — I want to write what I want and publish all kinds of things.

I didn’t think there were a lot of authors like that, but it turns out one of my favorite new finds, Emily Henry, does exactly that. I found her through her actually-lacking-tropes-but-when-the-tropes-are-there-it’s-intentional-and-ironic romantic (very) adult dramedies, but she’s also a prolific writer in the YA and sci-fi/light fantasy spheres. Sound like someone you know?

I’m not calling myself the next Emily Henry especially because her style is more light-filled than mine (by which I mean I tend to have more depressing characters and plot lines, which is neither a dig at her nor a complaint about myself). It’s just nice to see someone doing what I want to do, writing outside of multiple boxes. Her turnout is also straight-up insane. Her published portfolio is stupid impressive, and I admire her work ethic. Someday when my medications are working and I’m less stressed about the world I want to be just like her.

Speaking of badass female writers, I met Katie Moulton! She’s the author of (among a lot of other cool-ass things I need to read now), Dead Dad Club: On Grief and Tom Petty, an audio memoir with its own soundtrack (how freaking cool is that?) that I listened to while cocooned in my own personal fever dream on the ground in the shower because it was the only place I could breathe for the entire month of January.

She was the inaugural guest writer for Woven Words, a new program the George Washington University (my alma mater, gross) started in partnership with the Textile Museum. Probably twenty undergraduates, me, and a few professors (including the professor who taught a memoir class that changed my brain in my third year of school, I still have such a professional crush on her) sat in the upstairs gallery-turned-event-space.

Katie Moulton did her reading from one of her essay collections while standing in front of this giant installation called what color is divine light? by Anne Lindberg. It was basically a huge twenty-foot stretch of weaving fibers in all kinds of colors but mostly skewing toward the blue, green, yellow, and white spectrums. In other words, just a dope-ass background for a creative event. There was an open mic after but I only stayed for the reading (and a good long chat with Katie, because I’m just cool like that) because I needed to get back to the parking garage and pick up an antique cabinet that I turned into a baby-safe bar cart. I also had grilled cheese. It was a good day.

Anyway, I need to leave for work in a little less than an hour and I’d love to get a tiny smidge of word count in before then. So I’ll stop here, and leave you (and myself) with the warm and fuzzy feeling of connection to the larger creative world. It’s gonna take some time (haha, Jimmy Eat World), but eventually I’ll find my writing community and the support network I’m craving.

Til next time,
Mags