Tag Archives: motivation

On a Side Note #4: The Schedule

As you might have noticed did I manage to write – lo and behold – one measly post in Mai.
I had planned more than that.
I wanted to finish another What’cha Watching Wednesday, I wanted to continue my travel log from 2014, I wanted to continue the Fanfiction stuff, that’s been waiting since December and many more things.
But I didn’t do any of it.
Instead I went to couple of things, binge watched a couple of series and was basically not in the mood to write anything.
Since I ended The Weekend Guess my motivation to write something regularly dropped immensely (I haven’t even gotten around to add the other question-collections…).
I can’t even figure out what I would like to do on a regular – weekly ? – basis.
It should be something that takes as little time as the guess, but is just as entertaining/interesting.

What to do?

I can’t make a weekly song-suggestion as I partly did that in the first segment of the Guess and DarkFairy is doing a great job at that already.
I don’t really want to answer questions on a weekly basis like the Montagsfrage (Monday Question) or the Gemeinsam Lesen (Reading Together). Both are great opportunities to think about stuff you usually wouldn’t think about, but they’re also difficult as you kind of have to come up with something to stay in the loop.
With the Reading Together there is also the problem that you have to be reading something to be able to properly participate and even if I got a more or less regular reading habit again, this feels forced sometimes, especially as I’m only able to write the post properly in the evening after work.
Besides Monday and Tuesday are days where my motivation to do something useful after work are even worse than usual. But maybe I’ll still restart doing the Reading Together at least, who knows…
I’m currently considering to start a new segment for the weekend, where I talk about the many series I’ve watched (Series Satunday), but that would not fit the bill of an easy weekly post – and I would probably run out of series and motivation quite soon – like I did with the WWW.
Which in turn I thought about trying to do bi-monthly or monthly, depending on how much I watched, as it is quite some work to put down all my thoughts.
I don’t know if anyone would be interested in „Found on the Internet“ post, where I talk about stuff I came across.
I’m not even sure I’d like doing that.
I probably would rather share it through Twitter and Facebook than blog about it.
I’d also like to continue introducing people to Webcomics I’ve read or the language stuff I started way back and I think that might be more interesting than the „random stuff from the Internet“-thing.
There is also a lot of stuff, I still want to talk about that I haven’t gotten around to write about. So it seems like a proper schedule for all the longer stuff is in order.

So, this is the plan

Every second Wednesday there will be a post:
One week a WWW, one week a Webcomic (Webcomic Wednesday, so to speak).
Starting: Next week with a WWW (not sure yet, if I give you the complete one or a split version, of what I currently have)
Every other Monday there will be a post about a Concert or Festival I’ve been at – the Music Monday, even if some will still be called In Concert/At the Festival.
This way I hopefully get on track with my logs about them and maybe even talk about a few interesting long players (again).
Every other Tuesday or Thursday there will be either a post about my travellings – the Travelling T-Day – that’ll cover random stuff from the On the Road category, as well as actual travel logs or a Translation T-Day, covering the Lost in Translation stuff, I still want to talk about.
Maybe I’ll really go for the Series Satunday as well, but I’ll see how the stuff above will turn out before I make a final decision here – though the LiT stuff would fit here as well.
There is also another idea for the weekend that I’ll present you on Sunday (there’ll also be another Your Picture – A Story over at DF.PP Entertainment by the way).
I really hope I can somehow pull this off. It’s so frustrating that I can’t manage to keep up a decent schedule, so I felt it was necessary to give myself a kick in the butt to change this.

What do you think?

Does any of this sound interesting/boring?
What would you like to see more of?
Let me know! 🙂
PoiSonPaiNter

On a Side Note #2

I want to give you a little status update on a few things, so I’m using this category again, as I had anticipated last time.
My pile of stuff to type is getting bigger and bigger by the day and I feel like my brain is busy with so many different ideas that I just don’t know where to start.
As I mentioned in the last What’cha Watching Wednesday did a simple story-idea ran totally amok and I’m barely catching up with it…
Aside from that have I managed to publish a few stories, namely my entry for the Clue Writing Blog Parade and Chapter Eleven of Crossing Over – that were on my to-type-list last time – and a short story for a contest over at Edge of Night.
Guess what?

R.O._Winners_Award_PoiSonPaiNter

My award!


Isn’t that awesome? 😀
Either way, I also managed to write two more stories for Your Picture – A Story – again both are in German: Preparations (a continuation of Lukas‘ story from my Advent Calendar) and The Medlar – a Fairy Tale for a change. 😉
During my recent stay with DarkFairy we also managed to edit quite a bit of our book in a few days time, you can read more about it here: Scenes of an Editing Marathon.
Just yesterday I also sent off my Season Summary for Season Three of Supernatural, that might be published one of these days on The Extremis Review.
By now I’m also half way through this years Advent Calendar, but it already looks like my original plan will fail, but I’ll tell you more about that in December. 😉
Other than that am I trying to catch up with my Journey through a bit of Germany-series, as there is still a lot to talk about from last year and some new stuff from this year. I’m also going to expand on the travel logs as I want to include my trip to Ireland from last Halloween, the short trip to Liegé during my mini-Journey and the one to Stockholm I’m about to partake in at the end of the month (24th-26th).
Back in July I participated in another Reading Stage (Lesebühne) and presented some of my stories. Between reading them, someone I’ve been there with commented that I should publish my stuff as it is really good. So now we come to the main reason, why I’m writing this post:
After long contemplation I created an exposé for my Advent Calendar stories, but I wasn’t sure if I should really give it away for quite some time. Then Ed proposed to set a deadline for doing so. That deadline is today, so printed the exposé, put it into an envelope and really put that envelope into the letter box of a local publisher.
I’m still not entirely sure if that was the right thing to do.
Part of me is thrilled at the thought of it being read by professionals, another part is terrified of just that. You know how the saying goes: You’re your own worst critic, so my pessimism is greatly involved in me not believing what I have done and that they won’t like it anyway…
Well, guess we’ll see what will come of this…
See you around
PoiSonPaiNter
P.S. It’s been six months today and we regained some kind of normalcy by now, but it’s still so, so strange. Especially when Dad and I are cooking a meal after two different recipes at the same time or, you know, we’re attending a wedding together, that she would have loved to be part of…I just miss her soo much… 🙁

On a Side Note

As I haven’t really published anything here in these past few weeks, I felt like I should at least write something to explain this lack of content – or maybe even use this headline in the future to just rant about things.
Anyway, the lack of posts isn’t due to lack of ideas, far from it.
I believe, I could fill more than a month with The Wesen of Grimm alone.
Beside that, is my imagination working as well as it hasn’t had in quite some time. I have a rough versions of several stories or story-parts, but there is one minor problem:
I have them handwritten and I’m too lazy to type them…
Well, at least I managed to motivate myself to finish On the Run (German Story) and The Legend of the lost Keys (German story) in time for their release for Your Picture – A Story.

What else have I written?

You see, my mind was busy these past few weeks, but I didn’t get around or felt like typing any of it. Still, I prefer to write things by hand. I can’t really explain why, but I guess I just like crossing out stuff and not being dependant on technology. Back when I was still writing with a fountain pen, I also liked the way it cast its shadow on the paper…
Though, if any of you know an App or Program for a tablet that manages to turn terrible handwriting into computer readable words, I’d be more than happy to hear about it! A program like that would save me a whole lot of time…
As for the What’cha Watching Wednesday: It’s not that I didn’t watch anything either, but I didn’t really know what I should write about the series I’ve seen and apart from them I mostly watched old movies with certain actors and I still haven’t figured out how to include those things…
Either way, I’m not sure how often I will update the site during the next few weeks. On Wednesday I’m off to the Rockharz again with Anice, Black Kat, Babsi and others and two weeks later I’ll be visiting Fairy, Nazgul and maybe Icewolf, as a mini- Journey through a bit of Germany. Fairy and I will also be at the Noch ein Bier Fest (One more beer feast) by Sabaton, which will be a lot of fun…
Wish me luck that I can think up another Weekend Guess in time for my departure, as I already had trouble with the last one.
See you around
PoiSonPaiNter

The awful moment when you can't properly write…

As I mentioned last time with my new instalment of The Weekend Guess I can’t really put my thoughts into proper posts right now.
And yes I don’t consider this rant to be a proper post either.
There is so much stuff I’d like to write or write about.
So many stories floating in my head fighting for attention.
So many ideas popping up, reminding me of unfinished drafts.
I think I just don’t know where to start…
I really like to complete or add to my stories, but I can’t seem to be able to find the proper motivation for sitting down, planning and actually typing it.
As you know I do dabble in Fanfiction.
I already have a story that awaits its completion since 2012 and I don’t really know why I don’t feel like finishing the next chapter. (Well, maybe it’s because the Manga it is based on are quite weird „lately“…)
I also have plenty of other ideas that I currently don’t feel like working on (see my profile on Fanfiction.net for a look at those).
Still, my mind seems to always wander back to The Return of Magic, a Merlin Fanfiction (season six-thingy) I started recently. I get all kind of ideas for stuff happening towards the end, but I only have a little bit of what should be going on in the next few chapters, where the characters actually meet each other again and stuff…it’s bugging me, but I can’t help it, my muse is weird that way…
I also have brought it upon myself that I want to re-do The Elevator story as Multi-Chapter Multi-Fandom Crossover story. Again, many thoughts on how to continue and little on how to start and finish…
Muse and Imagination thou art* unfair…
I also want to write some proper original stories again, like continuing with the stories of the dwarves that we last saw on their Quest for Ore.
I’d like to finish the missing reviews and reports from concerts and festivals I’ve been at last year and many more things I still have only drafted.
But as soon as I think „Yeah, I’d like to get that done.“ my mind wanders off to totally unrelated thoughts and the procrastination begins.
It’s enough to drive you up the wall (in frustration) or „Es ist zum Mäusemelken“ as we’d say in German (Mäusemelken roughly translates to „milking mice“, so the literal translation is something like: It’s like milking mice. Or something like that).
But on the bright side:
I get more and more comfortable with writing posts that have less than a thousand words…though on the other hand I annoy you with my ramblings instead of posting something proper.
I’m so sorry for that, but as I said: I don’t like it myself, but I can’t seem to help it right now.
Other than that there are a couple of nice things coming up for me, that are also kind of urging me to hurry up with my festival and concert reviews/reports.
Next weekend (after picking up my Bachelor’s degree certification in Elmshorn, a former fellow student in Hamburg and driving back) I/we’ll be having a look at the Jazz Frühling (jazz spring) in Neubrandenburg. Something entirely different to the music I usually listen to.
In early April I’ll be visiting Liathano again in Germany’s capital city and stay for a concert of Van Canto and possibly a medieval market as well.
Just a week after that Brüllmücke and I will return there to see Schandmaul live.
I’m quite looking forward to all of that and maybe it will spur my imagination enough for me to continue or write the stories that are still eagerly waiting to be typed.
See you around and sorry for the rant.
PoiSonPaiNter
* Sorry for possibly misused words.