Muse Monday 0005

AM Devine

Hey look! It’s a shiny Muse Monday! Throw a great ball at it!

*wiggle*

*wiggle*

*wiggle*

*CLICK*

Hey look at that! You caught a shiny Muse Monday! Congrats!

I’m mostly back on track with my various writings, but admittedly I had to take a media break. This is important as a writer.

Let me tell you why. (And why it’s here as a Muse Monday thing.)

A media break is where you take a break from writing to take in some other form of creative media. From binge-watching your new favorite show on netflix, to seeing that movie in theaters that you’ve been wanting to see, to just doing some pleasure reading – it’s all really useful for recharging your brain.

Even switching to another project for a while can help give you a break from your primary project.

Why is this important? Because eventually, you’re going to run out of the ability to create. Creativity is both a finite and an infinite resource. It’s like bamboo. It something that grows remarkably easily (and pretty prolifically), but you have to plant the seeds first.

Sometimes, this works as simply as switching to another project, or finding a creative prompt. Sometimes you’re more low on the creative juices than normal and just need the break.

Taking in new stories and new things helps your creativity, your muse, have a better and easier time coming up with new ideas. This means it will be easier and easier for you to knock out your word count goal every time you sit down to write. If your creativity is too tired or burnt out, you’ll eventually give up and you’ll no longer want to write.

So definitely take the time to recharge your creative battery. Plant the seeds of creativity and take a break.

I personally try to build in breaks into my schedule, specifically, I try to make sure that I get far enough ahead in my writing that I can take the weekends off. Treat writing like you would a job, where you have those breaks built in and you’ll discover that writing won’t tire you out as much as it once did.

My personal schedule, thanks to probably one of the most laid back jobs you can have, matches my work day literally. I work in an office where they don’t mind if I write in the down time. So I’m actually sitting in the office right now, busting out words with my portable wireless speaker sitting on top of the desk organizer and my laptop next to the primary computer. So far tonight, I’ve written nearly 1.8K words, and am relatively on track for 7k words in my shift. As a side effect of this awesome job, I have a lot of time to sit at my desk here and just write. So I’m working on getting into the habit of doing that, so that I can have my weekends free to do whatever I’d like. Which also includes reading for pleasure and just generally recharging my mind.

If you’re not lucky enough to have time to write on most days, then go ahead and make a schedule that you can keep to for writing, and guard your writing time fiercely. If you can get into the habit of doing it each time that you’ve set aside, eventually, you’ll have programmed your creativity into working best at those times. And your mind will have it’s recharge times built right into your schedule.

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So, take some time to recharge your muse, to make your muse better.

Truthful Thursday 0003

AM Devine

Hey folks! It’s a bit late night, but it’s still Thursday so I thought I’d throw a little Truthful Thursday out there! Well, ‘little’. If you’ve been around, you know that sometimes I’m extremely brief, and sometimes “long post ahoy” doesn’t even begin to express that the post ahead is long.

At the moment, I have no idea how long this post will be, but I can say with certainty that it’s not going to be brief.

Read more “Truthful Thursday 0003”

Happy 2017

AM Devine

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Obviously, I fell off the freaking posting schedule again. But, this time I’ve got something somewhat better going on in life and I feel like I’m finding my groove now.

It’s January 2nd 2017. Welcome to 2017, after such a horrible block of time for the fandom communities in 2016 – we can only hope that 2017 will treat us much better.

In that sense, I’ve got a few things that I am working on – and with any luck, I’ll work out a schedule for working on it all and will be able to start producing more than the occasional blog post.

Technical Tuesday 0003

AM Devine

So I haven’t done one of these in a long while. I know – I even forgot to come back and finish the two parter back in May. (Which, let me know if you’d like to see the rest of it, and I’ll go and redo the whole thing from the beginning.)

Now, a little Truth before we get into the Technical Tuesday. For the longest, I think I realized that the problem I have been having, even with these structured posts was that I tried to limit them too tightly. I wanted the Muse Mondays and the Technical Tuesdays to be nothing but absolute solid stuff about writing. Mondays being for things that could provide inspirational help, and Tuesdays for the technical aspect of actually writing.

Unfortunately, I’m just not that good with the technical aspects of writing – and I’ll fast run out of things to post for Muse Mondays, I suspect, if I limit it to just purely writing related. BUT, if I were to expand both series to things that have made my life better as a writer. And class them by whether or not they inspire me (Muse Mondays) or assist me (Technical Tuesdays) – I could open up the series to a great many more things. While Mondays sound like they won’t really be changing, they actually will be. It’ll go from just things that could inspire just writers to things that can inspire all creative art.

So, with that being said, into TECHNICAL TUESDAY 0003!

Okay. So literally, this purchase, which as of this writing I’ve had for a little over ELEVEN hours, has made my life so much sweeter.

I love listening to music all the time. As I work on my stories, as I draft blog posts, as I do some upkeep work in my bullet journal, as I do actual work related work, ALL THE TIME. To be quite honest, it is something I do pretty much more than anything else.

Additionally, I have this issue where silence actually makes my head hurt, because my hearing is sensitive enough that I pretty much have to have something to focus on or else I’m straining to hear the silence. Which probably makes no sense, but my ears complain if it’s too quiet.

So I’d been looking at wireless bluetooth speakers for ages. I wanted one that was respectable, had good volume levels, decent range on the wireless ability, and an aux port – but that was also a little waterproof (ie – I could sit it next to the tub while I was taking a bath and wouldn’t have to worry). I know this seems like a big list, but I have certain needs that I was really wanting it for over everything else.

I finally bought one on amazon this last thursday, and I got it saturday evening. (The joys of Prime, am I right?) I charged it for a little over 1.5 hours and then I connected it to the old iphone 4 I have and use as an ipod and shower radio and all that. (no, I don’t take it into the shower – I have a glass box shower and it’s just outside the glass.)

Well, off of that 1.5 hour charge (which wasn’t to full, by the way) I’ve already gotten 7 or so hours of playtime at near max volume – or a few notches down.

Right now, it’s playing off of my iPhone 6+ next to me, and I think I have the volume at half. Music sounds great, it’s just fantastic. I’m sitting at work and it’s a great little device to have parked on the desk not far from me. It’s about the same length as my iPhone 6, and is roughly 1.5 inches tall and 1.5 inches deep. It’s a tiny little brick that makes a lot of noise.

And it’s so nice to not have to worry about whether or not my computer is going to freeze at work because the 4GB of ram doesn’t like four internet tabs + scrivener + word + itunes running.

If you want the one I have, find it HERE.

I’ll definitely post another comment about this speaker either later this week or sometime next week. I’ll probably post my review after I’ve had it a week, and done some bonus damage to my eardrums.