It was an accident that started with wisdom teeth removal surgery in December and continued with combinations of work, tired, procrastination, and an exhausted backlog.

And current times don’t feel like a good time to try and hold myself to a regular posting schedule.

I want to keep sharing my work with the world, and I’m still writing new work. I’m not sure what form this website will take in the coming months, but I want there to be something here.

So until the world’s on a slightly more even keel, I’ll drop in occasionally with silly things or news, but I’m not aiming for a particular pattern.

I hope you’ll stick through the uncertainty with me.

Stay safe, hold onto love and community whenever you can.

In August of 2017, I decided to actually do something with this website that had sat dormant for a year and a half. I was going to post something every week. Maybe even try and get some people to read it. At the time, the challenge was to keep that up for a year, to see if anything interesting would happen, to see if I could do it for a whole year.

While there are a few gaps over the time since then, I’ve kept it up pretty well. I had some pretty awesome things happen during this time as well, as I mentioned back in January when I looked back on 2018’s highlights.

But now I have to figure out how to reboot into a new challenge. I’ve kept this place for a year, for more than a year.

So, now what?

It’s getting more difficult to post every week. I’m having trouble dedicating enough time to do very much to promote this website. I have less writing I can fall back that doesn’t require major edits before it’s posted, so my posts are getting generally shorter, and it’s distracting from the writing I need to do be doing on my novel.

I’m proud of the progress I’ve made and the pieces I’ve posted here.

I didn’t want to give this up, so I took time to think about where I want to progress.

So, now what?

Now what is new challenges.

I want to see real, continual progress on a novel length piece for the first time since I was fourteen.

I enjoy the short pieces I’ve been posting. They’re fun and challenging and much less stressful than striving to finish or edit longer stories. They allow me to experiment with different styles, characters, and stories besides the main project.

I hope you enjoy them as much as I do, because they’re here to stay as I give my book higher priority.

I want to see my writing reaching a wider audience. I want to find more opportunities to share my work with people. (This is a fantastic time to share a favorite piece of mine with someone you know, in case you were waiting for a perfect moment,) I want to push myself a little more to be present in writing communities. Though, not at the expense of my novel writing time.

My goals laid out, I’m excited for the next steps! I have pieces coming up that I’m excited about, I’ll have a poem in Seattle Erotic Art Festival’s Anthology in April, and I have new awesome things to look forward to. Thanks for being part of the awesome!

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Follow me on Twitter! I’m tiny and I know nothing, it’ll be a fun train wreck, I promise. @ZoeBrook7

I want to take a second to revel in the small victories. 2018 had several awesome writing moments for me, which was quite affirming. Whether by coincidence or reward, I’ll take it.

Early in the year I was a “slushpile” reader for the WRITE CLUB Contest, and I got to read through all the fantastic 500 word submissions. I was really intrigued to see how the audience interacted with the stories once they were posted. It was a good experience, and a lot of fun.

In April, an excerpt from my 2017 Nanowrimo project was published in the Seattle Erotic Art Festival’s Literary Anthology. I attended the festival and participated in their Wanderlust Poetry tour, where accepted authors were able to see the accepted artwork and write poetry to read during the tour. My poem Confidence Talks, a response to the piece Flauntleroi, was featured on the artist Hooligan Lili’s website.

I made a wholly under-prepared presentation, Talk Sex Positively Now, at Olympic College’s Diversity Conference in June and talked about consent and sex positivity basics. I would love to improve my skills in presentations and preparations, as I enjoyed the opportunity it gave me, but I struggled to pull everything together and make it a worth while conversation.

I participated in the NYC Midnight Flash Fiction Contest for the second year. I’ve not made it past the second round, but I’m proud of the stories and ideas I’ve come up with through their prompts. Keep My Memories and Me Too were my 2017 entries.

I attended Willamette Writers Conference in August, did a few pitches, a manuscript critique, and went to as many sessions as I could. As always, it was a wonderful experience. Ijeoma Oluo, Vivek Shraya, and Charlie Jane Anders were amongst the fantastic keynotes, and I was delighted to see more queer authors and diversity topics in the session line ups. I learned a lot from my pitches, and the critique was awesome. I came away with more knowledge and ideas on how to further my writing and my current work in progress.

I got to read Sensational Ailey at Salon of SEAF: Explore Written Erotica. It was a ton of fun visiting their new gallery space and listening to the other author’s readings.

In October, my short story Guard Crow was featured on Not A Pipe Publishing’s website as part of their #TheYearOfPublishingWomen’s short story series. It was an honor to be featured as part of their series, and I encourage you to check out their anthology “Strongly Worded Women: The Best Of the Year Of Publishing Women” which features other’s contributions to the series.

I wrote for NaNoWriMo in November, meeting 50K for the seventh year. (Out of eight but who’s counting 2016?) More on that here.

My year wrapped up with my family buying a house and moving through December, which is unquestionably awesome and lucky.

I’m excited to put more energy toward my writing, and see what I can do in 2019.

NaNoWriMo 2018 ended a week ago, and I’m still tired.

The previous years I’ve written for Nano, I’ve held myself to a very high standard as to how I would count my words. It was all toward one, newly started project, and only words in the manuscript draft itself were counted. All the writing I was doing for school, for other projects, even for the info and notes on the Nano projects weren’t to be included.

This year I was a little more desperate creative with where I counted words.

I didn’t start actually writing until the seventeenth. At that point, I hadn’t even written one full day’s count. Usually when I’m that far behind, I at least had a foundation of words. Not this year.

This year I counted all the words I created in November on my project, one that I’ve now worked on for three years (part of it’s published in This Anthology, which was super exciting!). Notes, editing, internal screaming. Actual drafted materials. The pep talk I wrote myself about making mistakes and giving myself a plan for fixing them later, once the project has actually been created. I counted all those words, all the words I could, and it was still a hellacious slog.

After a few days of catch up, I was overwhelmed and bored and frustrated. I ended up trying to figure out if I could murder a character without drastically changing the actual plot of the project, which did not call for a murder.

It turns out I could figure it out. And that it solved a couple of problems I’d been having with plot holes, motivations, and backstories. I only had to go back fifteen years, invent twelve new characters, take them across the country, and casually change tone from lighthearted danger rebellion to dark, murderous, with extra tasty trauma emotions.

This sideways mutation of my project has been lovingly dubbed Plot Bunny Noir, and made up a majority of the words collected for the month.

I made 50K words on the last day, between all of the pieces related to my project. I took approximately five minutes to feel elated, and then I took a nap while my brain melted.

I’m proud of the writing I did this month. A lot of it will be useful, even and especially some of the plot notes, editing theories, and world building blocks. I ended up solving a lot of issues I’d been having, I managed to survive the word count, and an exhausting time was had by all.

To everyone who participated, you accomplished something awesome*. You have all the permission to be proud of yourselves.

To everyone else, wow what a normal month you must have had. I hope it was a good one.

Everyone should be proud they survived another month, words or no words.

I wish you several good sleeps.

 

Bonus Cool  Shit:

National Novel Writing Month

1,667 Words

*See? Awesome!