Jon Hakes. Writer. Official Online Outpost.

As I’m feeding the baby his avocado, let me also take a moment to provide a how-to-read tip about the posts on this site.

If you go through and read all of my posts from the last year-plus, and continue to read the new posts as I put them up, it is probable that you may run into contradictory information about my approach to writing.  If this is the case, don’t despair.  It’s sort of a feature of the system.

I’m feeling more confident in my abilities as a writer these days, but this is well above average for the last seventeen years.  For most of that time, I’ve found myself coming up with new mental frameworks, new approaches to writing, flailing around to find any little thing that will work for me.  I’m still suffering from this mindset, despite my general feeling that my writing process has improved substantially.

Just keep this in mind if I suddenly post something about writing that seems wildly contradictory with something I posted in the previous month.

I’m at a little bit of a loss.  I’m sitting here on a Monday afternoon, and the baby is taking a completely unexpected nap.  I’ve managed to get through several tasks (writing and otherwise) that I wanted to get through today, and I suddenly have some free time to spend.  But all of the story drafts I’ve been working on (or thinking about going back to) suddenly seem wholly unsatisfactory.  In fairness, several of the ideas have been hanging around the mental street corner, acting suspicious, for several years.

I find myself thirsting for something new.  I suppose that means that I should be brainstorming new story ideas, which, of course, makes my brain clench up defensively.

Actually, I think that what’s going on here is that I’m having a moment where I feel more or less on top of things, which is not a feeling I’ve had often in the last four years or so.  Not that I don’t have other things I need to do, but with several stories out in submission and the latest round of dirty diapers successfully moved from the travel pouches to the can in the nursery, it just seems like Monday is going well.

And the baby just woke up, so maybe the magic is over for another day.  Still, I’m betting that I’ll get back to writing later in the day.  Dare I say, I feel motivated.

Just in case you need outside verification that “Space Falling” was actually published by someone who is not me, the Brain Harvest archives are back up.  You can find my story here.

Hey, so, sorry, didn’t get back as quickly as I’d hoped to at one point.

Also, the writing has been a little more sporadic in the last two weeks.  Hopefully, that won’t dilute what I’m about to say.

Yes, as you might suspect from my previous post, the idea of Flooding the Zone, as applied to writing is not too much different as the same idea applied to writing.  Basically, I’ve been keeping multiple story drafts open, every day, letting myself go where the inspiration leads.  This was working like gangbusters (two story drafts completed, a few more moved much farther down the road), up until I hit a bit of a cold patch recently.

The cold patch has had more to do with other fathering/household responsibilities than anything, so I’ve been sticking with the Flooding the Zone plan for the time being.  Of course, the question becomes:  What happens when I get discouraged on multiple stories at the same time…?  Guess we’ll all find out together.

In the meantime, I’m hoping to finally get a few more stories out in submission by the weekend, and to push forward on some of these other drafts.