Kassie N (dear-llama) - Writer's Page

It’s the end of the first month of 2023… and I feel like it’s lasted forever. 🫢 It felt unreal to me when the year had just started — like the new year was just a continuation of 2022 — but now I feel like it’s been 2023 for a long time. 😂 While I didn’t get as much writing as I’d hoped I would this month, I was busy preparing for other projects of mine I’ve carried over into this year — mainly the personal project I’ve been calling 🍃Project: Leaf. It’s still in the works, and I’ve decided to chill out a little and focus on writing again for the time being (though Project: Leaf has a deadline so I can’t chill too much 👀).

I also got around to writing out some creative goals for 2023:

My main goal for the year related to writing — or more specifically, finishing the rewrite of my novel, Something Better. I’m tired of dragging this rewrite on and on, and I originally planned to publish it this year, but that’s no longer possible… So the next best thing would be the at least finish the entire draft so I have something completed on hand. The problem with me and this novel is that I feel I’ve outgrown this novel, which is the reason I find it so hard to rewrite now. 😅 But the issues that led to the creation of this story are still important to me — though I must admit, they don’t plague me quite so much anymore. Even so, I still feel like I want to do a proper revision of the story to make it something I am able to feel proud of. I don’t must like the way the original plot (and characters) went anymore.

Anyway… I did write a little over 1-2 weeks — by hand. Only to discover that I seem to write absolute garbage when I write by hand. I don’t know if it’s just me, but I feel the words I churn out when I’m typing sound more coherent than when I’m scribbling them down longhand. Maybe I should just return to writing on my phone. The words seem to come much more naturally then.

Might be because I started writing as a kid on my mother’s laptop. 🤔 I remember sitting at her laptop and type out page after page of stories (I used to write Adventure then) when I was 8 or 9… Of course, I did write by hand in little notebooks as well, but I’ve always preferred typing when it came to my stories. That might have carried over into adulthood, who knows?

After that, I started feeling under the weather and stopped writing for a week. The week of rest was just what I needed, but when I recovered, I got distracted by more prep work I was doing for Project: Leaf and its upcoming reveal. I doodled a logo for the project a while back, which I wanted to make into a vector so I could cut it out onto vinyl to make a sticker, so I went back to work on the vector. Only to find out it looked horrible (and unfeasible) as a sticker. It was pretty much a disappointment and nothing like what I had envisioned.

So it’s back to the drawing board with that one. I will try to make all the lines thicker and find a way to make it look less… amateurish after being cut out onto the vinyl sticker. 🫥

In other real-life news, I’ve also been busy celebrating the Lunar New Year! 🍊🍊🧧 This is the first year we’ve celebrated in 5 years, because we’ve somehow been in mourning the past 5 years and haven’t been ‘allowed’ to celebrate. It was nice to finally do something a little festive and enjoy some of the traditions we’ve been abstaining from (like having visitors and visiting others and collecting ‘red envelopes’).

It’s been fun! 😎 We also had a bit of an incident on the first day of the Lunar New Year (last Sunday), where something caught on fire on the stove and it got quite scary for a bit before we put it out with a fire extinguisher. It’s always a good idea to have a fire extinguisher around at home — it’s a good thing I bought one on a whim last year after a little fire exercise we did at work. 😅

I’ve also been doing a lot of work for Project: Leaf, but I’m not going to talk about that yet, so that’s all I have to say on the topic. 🤐 I just hope that I can get to reveal it soon — I’ve been sitting on it for so long (and also because it’s been dragged out by the redesign since I wasn’t happy with how it turned out the first time), the excitement I originally had for it has somewhat fizzled out. 🙃 But I hope the redesign will be completed soon and I can finally talk about it. There are also 1-2 extensions to the project (things directly related to but not part of the original project) that have been taking up most of my days this past week, and it’s giving me more than a little stress, I have to admit.

Let’s hope I get more writing done in February, because I want to finish at least half of it before the start of March. I was originally hoping to finish the whole draft by then, but even half is looking a bit too ambitious now, considering I haven’t even written one chapter this whole month. 🥲 I have to find a way to work on Project: Leaf and still do some writing for this novel. On top of work and life and everything else. 🫠

Another fun thing I’m hoping to finish soon is a wax seal stamp! I’m not going to be making the stamp on my own; I just want to create the design and get the stamp custom-made somewhere. I have some ideas for the design (I will then also use it for Shirt Design 3, which I couldn’t finish last year but want to this year) and will have to sit down to properly draw it out. ✏ Maybe sometime in the next week! I want to send it in quickly so I can use it as soon as possible, because I have ideas for what to use it on, already.

So many plans and so little time. (But what’s new? 🤣) One thing I need to learn to do this year is to finish things I’ve started. Because 2022 was a year of leaving a lot of things unfinished, and I need to change that this year. 🙊