Sunday Morning Tea: Nov 13, 2022

Good Sunday morning and welcome to my front porch for Sunday Morning Tea!

For the uninitiated, Sunday Morning Tea is my virtual writing salon, where we talk about our writing goals and projects while sipping on a hot cuppa tea!

The temperature is falling. With winter a little over a month away, it’s finally starting to feel like fall. So I think I’ll warm my soul with the fall flavors of cinnamon and cloves.

Yep, that’s right, I’m drinking Harney & Sons Hot Cinnamon Spice again (not an affiliate link). This tea will be the death of me. I would happily replace my daily water intake with it if I didn’t think that would severely dehydrate me.

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine texted me this:

We really only got 2 months left in this year and I don’t feel like I accomplished anything.

Does anyone else feel that way? I’ve been saying since March 2020 (the beginning of the apocalypse) that we’ve been living the same day over and over again, hoping for different results. Isn’t that the definition of insanity?

As I try to think of anything significant that I’ve accomplished in the last two years, only a few come to mind…

I moved into a bigger apartment. Sure, it’s not a house, but have you seen the prices of houses these days? Who the hell has that kind of money?

I got a promotion at work, though you can’t really see that in the paycheck now that rent has nearly doubled.

I finally started writing again. Yeah, I would say that’s an accomplishment. And I recently revised and submitted my chapbook manuscript to the journal I mentioned in this post. Finalists won’t be announced until February, so instead of twiddling my thumbs wondering if I’m enough, wondering if I was too hasty in submitting these poems, wondering if I should’ve spent more time editing them even though some of them are nearly a decade old (and that’s about how long I’ve been editing them), I want to try to accomplish something else with my writing before the year’s out.

For those of you participating in NaNoWriMo, you are now entering week two. I debated whether I would join or not, and though I did write a scene for my Dracula screenplay (and I may write another if the inspiration bug bites), I ultimately decided to stick with my No Holds Barred Poetry Writing Challenge. And I’m happy to say I’ve been able to write a poem every day in November so far.

And speaking of poetry, something amazing happened a few days ago. Do you remember my first NaNoWriMo project, Love Poetry? It eventually became an A to Z story. Well, in a random burst of inspiration, I wrote a scene from that story. I haven’t touched this novella since 2017, and out of nowhere I completely reimagined the first chapter.

I love that all my old works in progress—and some new ones—are flooding back now that I’ve committed myself to writing regularly again. Of course, finding the time to write them and balancing that with how much time I spend on the blog is still a struggle. Now that we’re off Daylight Savings time (curse anyone who wants to make Daylight Savings permanent! I hate waking up before the sun), it might be easier for me to wake up for an early morning writing sprint. That would also mean I need to stop dilly-dallying at bedtime, which is easier said than done. But it is Sunday, the start to a new week, a time to start over and refocus on our goals, and I have a few goals that I’m in a mad dash to accomplish before the year ends:

Successfully write 30 new poems (and they don’t have to be perfect) for my No Holds Barred Poetry Writing Challenge (12 down, 18 more to go).

Bring back 31 Days of Holiday Hooligans for December. Because who doesn’t love a marathon of holiday-themed stories during this festive time of year?

Finish editing my short story I wrote in September, so I can begin submitting it to literary journals in January.

Revise my Countdown to 31 Days series. If you were following my blog in 2017, then maybe you remember my serial story about Natasha and Mitchell and their circle of friends as they prepared for a Christmas wedding. I’ve been promising for years that I would edit and publish that story for your guys. I haven’t forgotten that promise. And God willing, you will see that story again on a certain self-publishing platform very soon, just in time for Christmas.

And that’s it for my goals to close this year! I don’t want to put too much on my plate, especially because I have a history of burning out when I make too many writing commitments. The year of the longstanding works in progress, specifically Love Poetry and Lost Boy, will be 2023. And hell, maybe I’ll add Dracula to that too.

So what are your goals? Have you felt frozen in 2022? Let me challenge you to pick a goal, any goal, that you can accomplish in these last six weeks of the year and do it! Do it! I believe you can!

Until next Sunday, fellow writers!

—Nortina