Briony Hale

I’m Still Here

November 14th, 2023

Taking somewhat of a break, which for me means a massive amount of creation without trackers or deadlines. In truth I’m dealing with a lot emotionally, which is both normal for the holidays and an absolute drag on me physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and creatively.

I know this is a season of quiet, of rest, of reflection, of preparation for something else, but in the meantime I feel absolutely exhausted. I want more. I don’t know how to make it happen. I am more acutely aware of the relationship between emotion and writing as an art.

It’s slow. It’s hard. I’m still here.

Much love,

BH ❤
I Took A Break

October 30th, 2023

My love and I closed our long-distance gap for two blissful weeks, during which time I can honestly say I barely thought about the sheer amount of work I need (want? am volunteering?) to do in the next two months and, in many ways, the next few years. Now that we’re back to our regularly scheduled programming, though, I can see why so many people endorse the idea of taking breaks.

I want to focus on multi-tasking, which I know seems like a bit of a contradiction but I swear the right balance works. On the one hand I’m working on some longer form projects, but on the other, I’m really the sort of person who needs a lot of successes and accomplishments in a short amount of time.

Being the kind of person who took ten years to write a very literary 200,000 word novel would absolutely kill me. I would be so bored. Out of my mind. I can do shorter commercial fiction, but I think a lot of the ideas that I have–and I do have a lot of them–would be better suited as short stories than as novels, and I think that taking the time to commit to re-writing some projects and re-imaging others as such would go a long way to clear the clutter in my mind as well as feed a sense of accomplishment while I spent time on longer works.

I don’t know what the right balance is, yet, but I’m sure it exists and I can’t wait to find it… if only I could manage to keep house at the same time.

Much love,

BH ❤
Just a Check-In

October 9th, 2023

I’m busy. Less busy than I could be, but still more than normal. It’s a good kind of busy, though. Maybe this is my new normal. I don’t think I could be this busy all the time, but I could probably be this busy most of the time.

I got a copy of The Hero With A Thousand Faces, which I haven’t ~~had time to read~~ prioritized. Maybe I’ll get to it this week, but more likely than not I won’t be prioritizing reading until the next release.

I said I was going to be working on commercial projects and short fiction simultaneously. Only one of those turned out to be true the last few weeks. I’m not doing everything that I want to in a day, but I’m not beating myself up about it. I’m happy.

My love is coming to visit in less than a week. I anticipate getting no work done for the duration of that visit. It’s okay. Someday I’m sure I’ll have a lot to say about The Process, about productivity and business and accomplishing things, planning and goal setting and task lists. Someday.

Today, I’m just grateful to have a life I can be this content with, even when things aren’t necessarily going my way.

BH ❤
Discombobulated

September 26th, 2023

I wish I had something more exciting to say, but I managed to get the first draft of book two ready for the initial read through which I hope to do tomorrow, and I pre-wrote the plotting for book three so that I could perhaps zoom through my draft at a reasonable pace instead of crawling along at three hundred word intervals every few weeks.

In short, everything is happening at once and I don’t know how to balance all the plates I have spinning.

Unfortunately, my life is most familiar to me in chaos. I need to spend some time, hopefully this weekend, resetting my home and my mind for the fourth quarter, but in the interim I have late nights and early mornings and no routine and I sincerely hope I’ll be able to report back in a week or two with much more consistency.

In short, I think I’m starting to understand the importance of routine in all of this.

Optimistic,

BH ❤
The Second Book

September 20th, 2023

I had fully intended to write about the drudgery of following up a first piece with a trudging second one, and until yesterday I could have. Yesterday was magic, though, the moments I live for.

I love the puzzle aspects of creating stories. I love thinking up strategies, genres, series, I love the ideation that occurs when you get a good concept in mind. The generation, the synthesis. It’s fucking magic.

There always, always, always comes a point in the middle where things go sideways. I get stuck. The 3,000 word count days become 300. It’s like being lost in the woods with a lamp and a general sense of I’m going that way to guide me. It’s slow, and it’s the worst.

It’s the moment the demons start calling. It’s the part of the process where voices in my head which aren’t mine get louder than I’m comfortable with. It would be easy, so easy to stop when I reach this point.

But I don’t. I keep going. Step by step. 300 word day by 300 word day. And what happens, if I keep crawling through this part of the process, is that eventually the forest thins, the words come easier, and there’s an inevitable moment when everything falls into place. It’s almost like a click, and when I feel that moment, everything falls into place.

I can’t say I want to do both drafting and editing at the same time going forward, but in this instance, I had fallen into the thick of it well before I had to edit. A day or two back into the process, and I’ve got the space I need to sort out the problems I was stuck on. The whole thing flows, now, moving more or less smoothly from beginning to end.

There’s still more work. I have about four scenes left to write. There will be big picture revision, rewriting, line editing, proofreading. Layers and layers and layers.

But the base is there. And that’s exciting.

BH ❤
I Thought I’d Feel Different

September 16th, 2023

I’m leaning in to the commercial projects. There’s an artist inside of me, somewhere, screaming, but every time a bill comes due the accountant in me tells her to shut up.

That’s a different post, for a different time.

I’ve known for some time that it was entirely possible for people to work, and make a living, on self-publishing, especially within certain genres. I don’t think I knew how easy it was. Oh don’t get me wrong, it’s been months of work on one project, on top of years of work on myself.

But it’s done. It will be out there in a few days, come what may, and I… I don’t feel anything. Tired. A bit gassy. Not the numbness of anhedonia but the contentment of everything just sort of chugging along the way I suppose it ought to.

I thought I’d feel different. I should have done it differently. I should have waited? For what, I wonder. For it to be better. For me to be better. How long I’ve let my self-esteem be determined by other people…

I want to do it again. Not tonight. Tomorrow. I want to rest, and wake with the sun, and spend the hours of my life with the people that I love, or the people that I imagine. I did it. I want to do it again.

Doesn’t that make one a writer?

BH ❤
Multi-Tasking

September 5th, 2023

Upon further reflection, I think perhaps I’m not as straightforward about why I’m starting to feel burned out. It’s not just the balancing act between the things I want to create and every other aspect of my life, although this is definitely contributing.

On the one hand, I want to create something for art. On another, for money. On another, for culture. I don’t know how to balance each, and the nature of things is that one really, really has to buckle down and focus in order to accomplish anything.

I’m not a sprinter. I’m not a marathoner. I’m a wander-through-the-woods-er, taking pictures of flowers and moss alike, trying to catch lizards, identifying every species of moth and butterfly I can find. A multi-tasker. A poly-potentialite, according to recent internet trends.

In any case, I’ve recently come to the conclusion that not every single idea that pops in my head needs (or deserves) to be a full-length novel, and I’ve been seeing people do some amazing things with short story collections lately. I suppose I’ll have to re-work things to see where they stand, if anything can be salvaged and reworked or if it must be culled.

I’ve spent my weekend taking a break, cleaning out parts of my home I’ve been avoiding and replacing mess with shelves. I hope a clearing and organizing of my physical space will encourage the same for my mental one.

Much love,

BH ❤
Some thoughts on productivity…

September 2nd, 2023

I clocked 24 hours of overtime this week.

It doesn’t feel like much. It doesn’t feel like anything in terms of productivity, but it feels like exhaustion in my body. I’m not slowing down on social commitments, I’m not volunteering less, I’m not doing fewer chores (not that I’m great at keeping up with housework to begin with). I’m cooking from scratch more, which is something I can honestly say I regret after spending a whole day making ravioli from scratch. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t better than store bought.

I’m trying to keep so many plates spinning at once and I think that I might be tired, but I don’t know how to rest. I’m beginning to see, in experience and not just conceptually, a divide between what is realistic to produce and what feels sufficiently productive. I know that this is very much a result of the society in which I live, of technology clashing horribly with the very real human condition.

Was there ever a time where everyone wasn’t too focused on making a quick buck to function? I try not to let it make me cynical, but it’s hard. Part of the problem is, I know, the nature of my mind. I want too many things at once. I’m not averse to hard work. I rather enjoy it. I just can’t manage to organize my thoughts and ideas and dreams and visions and goals in a way that makes sense, to me or in context.

I love creating things. I love striving for something. I put in 24 hours of overtime this week. One whole day of my week dedicated to a passion that might never result in financial compensation, for a love of the process and the hope that someday, it might.

I love what I’m doing. I’m also tired.

BH ❤
Into the Woods

August 22nd, 2023
A loose coalition of thoughts, some of which are only tangentially related:
- In the last week I’ve managed to thumb my way through an old copy of Strunk and White’s while finishing a first draft. It was nice to review an old favorite, but the emphasis on punctuation and grammar and syntax (as opposed to narrative or plotting or character) has me thinking a lot about the relationship between social media and language.
- I often tell close friends that, if given the opportunity to go back to school for a PhD, I would want to study the relationship between social media and epistemology, which is true, but my interest is as much about how language shapes our thought as it is about your preferred platform.
- I don’t have a point, which I suppose it what’s keeping me to a regular weekly schedule. I don’t know if anyone is ever going to read this. I hope that, someday, I will. I hope that if no one else ever stumbles across these words, that at least I will be able to review them at some future date and remember what my life was like right now.
- I like to think of the drafting process as walking through an unlit wooded area at night. I typically go in with a really good understanding of where I’m going, and an even better understanding of where I am coming from, but at a certain point in the process I am far enough away from both sides to be completely, utterly lost. I have to keep moving forward, hoping that I’m going in the right direction, but I can’t see through the fog much farther than the tiny little circle of lamplight immediately surrounding me. I just have to keep hoping that as long as I keep moving forward, I won’t stay lost in the woods forever.
- I’ve got a pretty good idea of what I need to be working on with this first draft, but I’m already drafting the next piece and for the first time in my life I have to balance both drafting and revising at the same time. It’s a whole new skill set, but one I hope to evolve over time.
- There are so many things I want to work on at once. Poetry, literary, commercial, trad pub, indie pub, chapbooks, zines, essays. Sometimes I feel like there is more inside of me than has a right to exist but when it comes time to externalize these things they become nebulous, vague, evanescent things which I cannot make tangible. I want to work hard but in creative work, “hardness” cannot be identified. It’s difficult not to tie in my creative hopes with my hopes for everything else in my life. I can simultaneously see the interconnected nature of things and want to keep them carefully compartmentalized. It feels so very much like fracturing a chrysalis.
- I want to keep showing up so that I can show I’ll keep showing up. I need some kind of trail of evidence, to prove things if only to myself that I am here and I wanted this. I wanted to create something, wanted it badly enough to try even between the weight of all my adult responsibilities, wanted it even after… everything. I am here. I showed up today. I hope it’s enough.
BH ❤
10,000k

August 15th, 2023
I started writing longer fiction as an adult when I was sick, and in a very unhealthy relationship.

While it was unknown that I was working on a manuscript, I was regularly able to write 5,000-7,000 words a day. On a good day I could make 9,000, but the allure of a 10,000-word day never left.

I fully believe that if I had been left to my own devices (or, perhaps, even encouraged), I would have eventually been able to produce 10,000 words in a day. I was in love with the story I was writing.

Unfortunately, I was not permitted to do so. Writing was making me happy, self-confident, and sure of myself in a way that people in abusive relationships are generally not allowed to be. The other person found out what I was doing, and made it a life mission to undermine me.

I always feel terribly self-conscious writing about it. To anyone who hasn’t been in this kind of relationship, the concept of being prevented from engaging in one’s own hobbies and interests sounds foreign, unrelatable. Why wouldn’t you be able to just do what you want?

But for those who understand… my ambitions were interfered with, and stayed fractured until years after I had left the relationship. I had to put my life, and my craft, back together around the rubble of what my life (and relationship) used to be. I did well, but I never quite returned to the 5,000-7,000 average I used to be able to do as easily as breathing.

I’ve been struggling a lot lately. I’m close, I can feel it, but the last two years have seen a lot of false starts. I never give up, but I never feel like I’m going anywhere, either.

Underneath all the struggles, I keep hearing a voice in my head that isn’t mine, saying that I’m wasting my time. I’ll never be successful. I need to be realistic. Who do I think I am? Why do I think I can do this?

Last weekend, I dug my heels in. I sat down, pulled out my journal, and wrote that I was going to write 10,000 words in a day. If I couldn’t do it, the voice was right and I needed to quit writing.

I made 10,000 words that day. I wrote 10,000 words in a day… and then didn’t write for three days. I wrote 10,000 words in a day, and then 3,000 in the next eight days.

Two lessons.
1. I can do anything I want to, and no one can stop me. Not even that person.
2. I can burnout. Fairly easily, actually.
I’m about done with the draft on this, which means I’ll be revising and editing and generally working in a way not conducive to tracking daily word counts. That’s going to be uncomfortable for me.

But the next time I start a first draft, I know I can’t be pulling 10,000 word days. I can do 2,000 a day, every day, comfortably until it’s completed. Maybe I can push myself to a 3,000 daily average, maybe 5,000, but I am a marathon person, not a sprint person.

That’s an okay way to be. 5,000, or 3,000, or 1,000 words a day will, over the course of time, produce a completed draft. The time will pass no matter what I do. I may as well spend it doing what I love.

Until next time,

BH ❤