Too Much and Not Enough

I’ve been doing a little too much researching and not enough writing. I realized yesterday that the last blog/Medium post I wrote, “A Written Correspondence”, was published six months ago. Yikes.

So I sit and ask myself why that is, and the answer is simply that I am falling back into bad habits. I am once again overthinking what I am writing. I tell myself that it needs to be better. I then do further research, revise it, scrap it, rewrite it from a different angle, scrap it, and repeat. One such post is about the life of a night owl. It has been rewritten three times now; I grew frustrated with the latest iteration and simply placed it on hold, stripping the due dates from my Trello card and tossing the sticky note from my whiteboard into the trash. What the original draft fine? Most likely.

Over this summer, I was even tempted to curate my blog, deleting posts I no longer like or rewriting others. Instead, I simply went to some of the top performing posts and fixed some formatting and grammar issues, leaving the rest be.

With the revelation of how long its been since I’ve written a blog post—something I feel is related to the publishing of these newsletters—I am telling myself to stick with it: draft, revise, and publish. You can go back later to tweak it or republish it entirely with newly discovered info. These ideas and thoughts aren’t frozen in time. They can be amended over and over again. Just write and publish.

I’ve completed my second copyediting class in the four course program; six months down, six months to go. 

It has been an illuminating experience to receive “training” on one aspect of the editing process. When I would edit other’s work before, I was all over the place. These courses are now helping me solid an editing plan and understand the different levels of copyediting. Knowing this has truly opened the doors on how deep I edit.

I’ll have two-three weeks off before the fall class begins. I will enjoy the time off.

Unfortunately, I have no new updates regarding this project. With more time now available to me, I will be diving back into this project. My goal is to complete the first draft by the end of September. Boom. I’ve given myself a deadline. 

Can I make it? Find out in the next newsletter . . .

For the past few weeks, I’ve been listening to the album Aaliyah by Aaliyah.

She was killed in a plane crash on August 25, 2001—just two weeks before September 11th. Since, her music has notoriously been unavailable on digital music platforms. While many fans, such as myself, kept our physical copies of her music, many were left without the ability to purchase digital copies or stream her music. After two decades, her music is finally available to purchase and stream. Hits such as “Try Again”, “Are You That Somebody”, or “One in a Million”, are now available to captivate new listeners.