And with that, summer is over, and summer is almost over, if you know what I mean. I graduated from GVSU over 30 years ago, and still feel energized by the start of the new school year.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for September 2023 is: The IWSG celebrates 12 years today! When did you discover the IWSG, how do you connect, and how has it helped you?

I discovered the IWSG when I started following the blog of Jean Davis, who I met through the Ottawa County/Grand Rapids region of National Novel Writing Month. I noticed that every once in a while a blog post with an oddly familiar title would pop up, and after some investigation discovered the IWSG blog hop.

I joined the blog hop in March of 2021, a year into the COVID-19 pandemic. The connection with other writers was a welcome relief after a year of isolation.

I participate in the blog hop every month, sometimes a lot, sometimes a little, but I try to stay engaged every month. Jean Davis is the only IWSG participant who I know personally.

Due to when I joined IWSG, I would say that the biggest benefit is the reminder that the world is full of creative people and everyone has successes and failures, triumphs and struggles, and that communities are things actively created, not passively experienced.

 

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group
is a community dedicated to encouraging
and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.

 

Well it’s been a crazy couple of months here at the Library of Winkelman Abbey. A major landscaping project took up most of May and June, with the final brick laid on June 28. I am on an extremely busy project at work which will keep me occupied through July 2024, and Zyra and I took a whirlwind trip around Lake Michigan, stopping in Chicago, Madison, Marquette, and Sault Ste. Marie. We saw several people who we have missed dearly, and while the break in the routine was much-needed, it was a lot of driving. Well over 1,200 miles in five days.

All of which is to say, my writing time since the Equinox has been basically non-existent.

But I have this week off from work, and am spending as much time as I can sitting on the porch with books and cats and various drinks and snacks. Therefore this is a week for recovery.

Since November 2022 (NaNoWriMo) I have written practically nothing, other than infrequent blog posts and almost-daily journaling. In past years I would have a pile of poetry, short stories, essays, etc. scattered around my house, laptop and brain. This year, that was not the case.

For a time I thought it might be an after-effect of contracting COVID back in January, but my newest theory is this:

For my entire adult life writing has been a social activity. I started when I worked at Schuler Books, sharing ideas with my cow-orkers and participating in weekly group discussions and writing groups. We were a mutually reinforcing, ever-evolving group of creative and talented weirdos, and we always had something new in the works.

Somewhere in the early 2000s, well after leaving the bookstore, the writing began to taper off, though I kept up with the journaling, and when blogging became A Thing I took to it like crazy (note that the archives on this site go back to 1999).

In November 2013, at the tail end of a profoundly hellish couple of years, I participated in my first NaNoWriMo, and joined a local writing group. This turned into five years of running Caffeinated Press, and though I was busier than ever before in my life, I still found plenty of time and energy to write creatively.

This was because, again, I was surrounded with creative people engaged in creative work, feeding off of that energy and contributing to it as part of multiple writing groups and projects.

For obvious reasons, social interaction here is 2023 is a much different thing than it was in 2018. And I am in a long-term relationship, and I am in my mid-fifties, and the world is a different place than it was five years ago. And I am a much different person than I was five years ago.

One of the biggest personal changes is that I have almost no solitude any more. My time to myself is measured in minutes, where it used to be measured in days. Therefore the thought of adding more interactions with people fills me with anxiety. Yet my writing habits of the past thirty years are tightly tied to being part of a writing community. Groups like IWSG are helpful but limited; for me, there are too many spatial, temporal, and digital interfaces between the participants to cultivate a sense of community like back in The Old Days.

But time only moves in one direction (for most of us, anyway), and having had the above realization, and having thought it through, now I can begin to do something about it. Time to get back to work.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for July 2023 is: 99% of my story ideas come from dreams. Where do yours predominantly come from?

My story ideas can come from almost anywhere. Most common is from being out in the world, talking to people or walking the streets of Grand Rapids, or sitting in a cafe or relaxing at the beach. Which is to say that most of my ideas come from those moments when I don’t have much else going on, and have the time and brain-space to follow a thought far enough to turn it into the seed of a story or poem.

That doesn’t mean that I have time to write the idea down; simply that the idea exists. If I remember it long enough to write it down, it is probably something worth exploring.

 

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group
is a community dedicated to encouraging
and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.

[2023.06.10 NOTE: This post was written several days later than was originally scheduled.]

Hi Everyone! I am just returned from a whirlwind trip around Lake Michigan where my partner and I stopped to visit friends and family in Madison WI, Marquette MI, and Sault Ste. Marie MI. Thus the lateness and brevity of this post.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for June 2023 is: If you ever did stop writing, what would you replace it with?

Good question! I would probably increase my practice time at Master Lee’s school. Then again that is something I should do anyway. Honestly, I can’t fathom what it would be like to stop writing, so a safe answer is that if something were to stop me from writing, it would probably be the kind of circumstance or event which would prevent me from doing almost everything else too.

 

 

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group
is a community dedicated to encouraging
and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.

Yeah, the above photo sums up my state of mind for the past month.

Not long after posting the April IWSG response, the burnout came crashing down and my mental capacity was reduced to little more than spasmodically responding to immediate stimuli. Fortunately, in my day job I am a programmer. Programming, when you boil it down to the essentials, is really about creating specific responses to specific stimuli. We call it “input”, but why split hairs?

Therefore my entire creative output for National Poetry Month came to maybe five poems, out of which at most one shows any promise. But I did become even more sleep deprived, which is a victory of sorts.

The May 2023 Insecure Writer’s Support Group question is: When you are working on a story, what inspires you?

This is a surprisingly difficult question to answer, as inspiration could change from story to story, or even from scene to scene within a story. So it might be more useful for me to answer that at a deeper level – what inspires me to be creative? And I think the answer to that is, the drive to create something which is ideally beautiful, hopefully internally consistent, and which effectively communicates the original multidimensional idea behind the story.

As I move well into middle age, and look back over the scores of stories and hundreds of poems in my portfolio, I think everything I have written is a facet of the same stone, and I am polishing that facet and presenting it to my readers and saying “Do you see?” And whether the answer is “yes” or “no,” I use that response as inspiration to hone my craft and try to communicate that idea through another facet, be it a novel, a short story, a poem, fantasy, science fiction, literary fiction, a game, or a scribbled note in the margins of an old Dungeons and Dragons character sheet.

At the beginning each of my creative works is inspired by asking “what if?”

As I near the end of the process, the inspiration may mutate into desperation because I just want to be able to write THE END without, you know, skipping to THE END.

As a final note, I want to thank the IWSG community for accepting me into their ranks. I have been participating for just over two years, and writing these posts, and reading the other answers to the monthly questions, help keep me focused and, frankly, inspired.

 

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group
is a community dedicated to encouraging
and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.

Oh, what a month was March. The hours seemed to fly by, but the days dragged. The weather is much improved, though the warmest day of the year so far was back in February.

I have a new project at work which, while not demanding any more time than any other project, is taking vastly more mental energy than I am used to, so writing over the past month has been sparse.

April is National Poetry Month! As with the past several Aprils, I attempt to write a poem a day for the month, while primarily reading poetry, just to keep my head in that space. So far I have written four poems, which brings my total for the year to, uh, four.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for April 2023 is:

Do you remember writing your first book? What were your thoughts about a career path on writing? Where are you now and how is it working out for you? If you’re at the start of the journey, what are your goals?

I have written six books over the past decade, thanks to NaNoWriMo. Of those six, two (one literary fiction, one magic realism/weird fiction) are completed first drafts. The rest are in various stages of “in progress” or “abandoned.”

It goes without saying, therefore, that I have not yet published any books of my own writing.

I have never expected to make a career out of writing books, or indeed any other kind of writing. The few pieces I have had published (short stories, poems) were not published at paying markets. This is fine. I used to run a small publisher, and I know how these things go.

But I suppose a “career” is not necessarily the same thing as whatever we do for our main, or even secondary (tertiary, etc.) source of income. This eases the pressure on writing by loosening time constraints and making those self-imposed deadlines more like guidelines. This works both for and against us, as I am sure all of you have discovered at one time or another.

As for writing goals, it is difficult right now to make long-term writing plans. I have a great many stories and poems bouncing around in my head, but finding the quiet time to put those words to paper is not as easy as it was five years ago. I am a little older every year, and when given the option between half an hour of writing and half an hour of sleep, sleep will win every time.

Then again, April is finally here and today the outside temperature is expected to be above 70°. That would make today the warmest day of the year so far. I don’t know about you-all but warmer weather just makes everything easier.

Even writing.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group
is a community dedicated to encouraging
and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.

The week before Christmas I was struck down by the flu. I worked from home for that week, and just when I started to feel better the Great Christmas Blizzard of 2022 covered West Michigan with a ridiculous amount of snow. Throughout these two weeks of isolation, Poe and Pepper (pictured above) were a wonderful source of amusement and affection for Zyra and I.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for January 2023 is:

Do you have a word of the year? Is there one word that sums up what you need to work on or change in the coming year?

For this year, I think my word will be Attentiveness. That point where attention meets engagement. I had little enough of either over the past (checks notes) five years, since I went on hiatus from Caffeinated Press at the beginning of 2018. The last three years have been a fugue of reacting to or recovering from outside world events. Now that we are through the holidays and already the daylight hours are growing noticeably longer, I feel a renewed energy.

Attentiveness, to me, means not just noticing the parts of my life which need attention, but then doing something about it. Whether it be my relationship with my partner, my health, the martial arts class, my family, my writing, our house, or anything else in my life, I think I am ready to re-enter the world and take care of the things which need taking care of.

 

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group
is a community dedicated to encouraging
and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.