New Year

I left my house last night knowing I didn’t write a post for the last day of the year, but I’m a low-key kinda guy, so I was okay with the blog ending on a small note (or I guess, non-existent note) than on some big extravagant thing.

And similarly, I thought I’d start off the year with a simple post. Yesterday, I spent the day revising a memoir piece about growing up and watching different representations of gay Asian people on TV and how that affected me. I submitted it to Existere magazine since their deadline was last night, and got it done. Felt really good about that, and it confirmed for me that I can in fact motivate myself to write and to keep writing and to submit my work when I’m out of school without assignment deadlines. Take that, no one.

So here’s to another year of even more writing, and hopefully getting a few more steps closer to assembling my memoir book.

Deadlines are great!

I may have written about the wonders of deadlines but in case I haven’t, they are awesome. At least if you’re into creative writing.

Case in point: I had an assignment due today, and I spent many hours working on it until I finished the first draft and submitted it a little while ago. Could I have done that without a deadline? Perhaps. Is it likely? Perhaps not. Even the awesome and lovely Amber Dawn reminisced about how great being in a program with deadlines was. Once you’re out of school, you have to push yourself to finish things and we all know we’re not very good enforcers.

Here’s a tip. I use submission deadlines for publications as deadlines to write and complete pieces I’m working on. It worked quite well last year, and I’m sure it would work well if I weren’t busy with my own assignments. How else do you all keep motivating yourself to write?

Places for Writers

I found this great website last night while posting links and resources for the blog for the Writing Centre at UBC, and it will now serve as a great motivator to get me to write and keep writing.  Places for Writers is a site that features submissions to publications, anthologies, books, etc. across Canada and the US.

Check it out!

http://www.placesforwriters.com/

Deadlines are my frenemies

I like them but I hate them.

Last night, I had to finish writing and send off a piece of fiction for my fiction class.  As I’ve said before, I find writing fiction extremely difficult, unlike writing other genres such as screenplay or creative non-fiction.  So there I was, home on Halloween night, both my eyes alarmingly red (from rubbing them and from staring at a screen for so long).  Every so often, I would abandon my computer, hang out with my cat in the other room, only to groan loudly and come back to my computer and continue writing.  Finally, after tying all the scenes together, I declared it good enough for a first draft (which is still pretty crappy) and submitted it with about twenty minutes to midnight.

A friend just texted me and asked what I did for Halloween.  I will tell him I was a zombie last night.