by Julie Glover

The last time I worked on my novel was…

I don’t know.

We don’t have time for me to tell you the whole story, but I turned up sick on October 9, 2020 and haven’t been back to my old self since. I’m better, but I have good days and bad days and too many doctor appointments as I work through what’s going on and how to treat my issues. (No, it’s not Covid.)

But whether it lasts days, months, or years, nearly every writer has had their plans interrupted by illness. How can you still make progress when you don’t feel well? Here are a few ways to keep moving forward.

Take Care of Yourself

Taking a break and caring for your health may seem like stagnation of your writing plans. However, it’s actually moving forward, because if you don’t care for yourself, you’ll get less done in the end.

At times, I’ve felt bad, tried to push through, and ended up spending three hours completing a task that would have taken an hour if I’d only waited until I felt better. I understand the frustration of wanting to get things done, but it’s vital to work smart when you don’t have full energy reserves.

Your best option may be to set your manuscript aside and spend time in the fresh air, grab a nap, or take an Epsom salt bath. Prioritize feeling better so that you’ll have the energy and focus to work on your book when you can.

Study Your Craft

If you can’t work on your book, read someone else’s. Or watch movies or TV series, noting story structure, great dialogue, and setting details. Take a Masterclass or a writing class online. Read blog posts about writing (WITS has a lot of great content!).

When my mind tuned out of my book, I tuned into Netflix, Amazon Prime, and audiobooks, sampling shows and books that made for wonderful entertainment and learning experiences.

While you’re having to take it easy, pick up some great lessons that you can later use to write or edit your novel.

Write Short

Divide your work periods into shorter segments. You may not be able to sit for hours and work on your book, but maybe you can do a scene a day or a set word count. Perhaps what you can accomplish is a blog post, a blurb, or an outline.

One of the lovely symptoms I’ve had is brain fog. I discovered early on that I couldn’t concentrate on a full novel, tracking the character arc, plot, and subplots across chapters and scenes. So, I penned a short story. That was the length I could handle, and my coauthor and I were able to release a fresh story in our supernatural suspense series.

Figure out what length of project you can work or for how long you can focus, and then do that. After all, if you can’t take big swallows, small bites still get the job done.

Do the Non-Writing Stuff

Most authors don’t get to shut themselves away, write their brilliant manuscript, emerge to hand it over to an editor, and move along to the next project. These days, authors also maintain a website, participate on social media, engage in marketing, track their sales, order or create book covers, and so on.

While not feeling 100%, you might still make progress on those tasks that require less effort than writing.

Me? I have a series of paranormal shorts I wrote some time ago that just need a little editing to be publication-ready. Since they will be cheap $.99 buys, I’m doing my own covers. (Not always a good idea. Check out this post, this post, and this post on book covers!) Working up these covers is right at my work capacity right now. It takes little effort to scroll through stock photo sites looking for ideas, download pics, upload pics, mess with text, etc. By the time I get to editing my shorts, I’ll have covers done or mostly done.

What small tasks can you accomplish? You might start by checking off some of these 30+ Ideas for Bite-Sized Book Marketing.

Stay Connected

While feeling unwell, you can also feel isolated. You can’t go places, do things, write stuff, interact like you usually do. Keep your spirits up by connecting with other writers.

My optimism gets a boost whenever I chat with fellow writers and learn what they’re doing. We discuss stories, characters, the writing life, etc., and it reminds me that I’m still an author—just on a brief hiatus.

Whether it’s checking in with other writers in a Facebook group, attending a writers’ event virtually, or calling up a friend, stay connected with the writing community. Your peeps can help you weather the short or long period of illness that knocked you back a little, and you’ll be back on your feet soon.

That’s what I’m planning. Soon, I’ll be back in my novel again, polishing it up to a shine so it’s ready for the world!

What other ideas do you have for making progress when you’re sick? What words of hope or encouragement can you offer others struggling with illness?

About Julie

Julie Glover is an award-winning author of mysteries and young adult fiction. She also writes supernatural suspense under the pen name Jules Lynn.

While not feeling quite herself lately, she still managed to release Gryla's Gift, a Christmas-themed story in the Muse Island series (co-authored with Kris Faryn and free in Kindle Unlimited), and Driving Emma, a young adult contemporary short story.

When not writing, she collects boots, practices rampant sarcasm, and advocates for good grammar and the addition of the interrobang as a much-needed punctuation mark.

Top image credit: silviarita from Pixabay

by Piper Bayard
of Bayard & Holmes

Everyone loves a good fight, and a good fight scene is arguably the lifeblood of every thriller. Since my writing partner, Jay Holmes, is a forty-five-year veteran of the military and intelligence communities, we are often asked what weapons we prefer for fights.

In truth, Holmes and I both advocate firearms training for the best self-defense, but shooting too many people in books tends to make for boring books. So we’re going to explore a bit more about how common objects can be used in a fight scene.

10 handy weapons in a bedroom.

1. Nightstand Lamp

A nightstand lamp can be one of your character’s most handy weapons. They can grab it by the pole and smash the base into someone’s face. Even better, if the lamp has a long enough cord, the character can jerk off the lampshade and shove the bulb straight into the attacker’s face.

The broken glass of the bulb will cause bleeding, and if it is still plugged in, your character gets the added bonus of delivering an electrical shock.

2. Glass Vase

Your character can grab it by the narrow end or, if it’s a pitcher, by the handle and smash the vase into the opponent’s face. If the vase breaks off, that’s okay. Then it will be like a broken bottle that can be used to slice the face or shove into the neck or groin.

3. Jewelry

Your character can throw jewelry in someone’s face to distract them for the next blow. Also, if a necklace is long and sturdy enough, your character can use it to choke their target.

Pendants can be especially useful in that they can be used to smuggle poison. Also, if your character is like Piper, they have a long, needle-like fashion metal pendant on a sturdy chain that can be worn to the office, on a plane, or into any building. That long, sharp needle can do some damage to the eyes, throat, groin, or ear. A nice cloak pin or an old-fashioned hat pin can serve the same purpose.

Note that if your character shoves a needle-like pendant or anything else into an ear, they have to go more than a couple inches in to do serious damage or even kill. It is not a move for the uncommitted.

4. A Desk

Small desk drawers that come out quickly can be thrown at an opponent to distract them and give your character a chance to run or use follow-up blows.

A wide drawer can be used as a shield. If a character is very strong and a desk rather light, they might be able to flip the desk over in a sudden move to startle someone. It’s not a first-choice move in real life, but it could be fun in a book.

What a desk is not especially good for, though, is a hiding place. Not only is it entirely too obvious, but if your character is hiding under a desk, they are as good as painted into a corner when their stalker finds them.

It’s difficult to fight effectively when squatting on the ground, surrounded on all sides. If one of our characters is hiding under a desk, we’re going to make sure they have a loaded firearm at the ready.

5. Wall Picture

Your character can grab a sturdy picture off the wall and drive the frame into their target’s face to stun them for follow up blows to the groin or instep.

Something commonly seen in fiction that is a bad idea is breaking the glass over the target’s head. It’s not likely to disable them, and it is just as likely to cut your character.

6. Candle

Your character can grab a candlestick and shove it in their target’s face. If the candle is in a jar and has been burning a while, your character can flick the hot melted wax into the face of the opponent and follow up by smashing the glass candle into their face or temple.

Be sure to follow up with some debilitating blows, though. If the opponent already wanted to kill your character, they will certainly want to kill them even more after they get wax to the face.

A lit candle can also be used to start a fire, but keep in mind that, unlike in Hollywood, most real-life fires take a few moments to actually catch and be helpful.

7. Curtains

We don’t recommend that your character hide behind curtains if there are other viable alternatives for the same reason we don’t recommend them hiding underneath a desk. It’s too obvious, and it leaves your character pinned down when they are found.

However, if they have time, your character can tie curtains to something solid and use them to escape out of a window. Also, if your character knows someone is coming into a room, they can light the curtains on fire and hide behind a door. When the person comes into the room, they will be immediately riveted to the fire, giving the character the opportunity to smash the stalker with the door and follow up with blows as the target enters the room.

If your character is attacking, they can twist the curtains into a cord to use to choke their target.

8. Curtain Rod

A good, heavy curtain rod can be wielded like a staff to poke, jab, smash, or block. Some curtain rods have fashion points at the end for stabbing at the face, groin, or ribs. If your character stabs into the ribs and hits a bone, don’t worry. The weapon will usually slide off the bone and into the body.

9. Blanket

Your character can throw a blanket over an opponent like a net and then either run or follow up with blows.

There is also always the tried-and-true method of lighting a blanket on fire while someone is sleeping in the bed. It generally takes the sleeper a few moments to realize what is happening, giving your character either time to escape or time to follow up.

Like all arson methods, we recommend that your character does not do this in their own home.

10. Cell Phone

Holmes’s favorite method of using a cell phone in a fight is to call in an air strike. However, if your character does not have an Air Force in their bedroom, they can use the light on their phone to flash in someone’s eyes. They can also use the phone to emit a distracting noise, or they can throw it at the opponent’s face.

If they have time, the character can use the phone to call 911, but that is not especially effective in an active fight. As the saying goes, “When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.”

A bed can also be used as a weapon, but we’ll leave that one to the romance writers.

On a general note, notice the frequent suggestions of targeting the face. Face wounds tend to stun and slow people. If someone is stabbed in the eye or through the cheek, they will have to mentally reset. Also, face wounds bleed. A lot. That and the fact that it’s lots of blood coming from a wound they can’t see tends to freak people out.

This gives your character time to follow up with a knee in the groin, a good stomp on the instep, or another stab or jab. Also, the target might feel compelled to put one hand over the wound, especially if it is an eye, leaving them to fight one-handed.

Always remember that with any fight, the greatest weapon your character has is their mind. Your character must be in a mindset to do what it takes to survive, or all the weapons in the world won’t help them.

What bedroom objects would your characters choose to incorporate into a fight? What questions do you have for us?

About Bayard and Holmes

Piper Bayard and Jay Holmes of Bayard & Holmes are the authors of espionage fiction and nonfiction. Please visit Piper and Jay at their site, BayardandHolmes.com. For notices of their upcoming releases, subscribe to the Bayard & Holmes Covert Briefing. You can also contact Bayard & Holmes at their Contact page, on Twitter at @piperbayard, or at their email, BayardandHolmes(at)protonmail.com.

SPYCRAFT: Essentials takes the fiction out of spy fiction, covering the functions and jurisdictions of the main US intelligence organizations, the espionage personality and character, recruitment, tradecraft techniques, surveillance, firearms, the most common foibles of spy fiction, and much more. Available in digital format and print. See Bayard & Holmes Nonfiction for links to your preferred bookseller.

Top Image by Pexels from Pixabay.

by Colleen M. Story

Is “doomscrolling” hurting your writing creativity?

If you haven’t heard of the term, it describes the act of consuming a lot of negative information at once, typically online.

It’s become more popular over the past year, but it could ruin your writing sessions. Here’s how and what you can do to protect yourself.

What is Doomscrolling?

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, doomscrolling gained steam as people began scrolling their news and social media feeds for information on how to protect themselves. Things got worse during the George Floyd protests and later, during the 2020 election, as we all compulsively scoured the Internet in search of ever more terrible information.

Strangely enough, we feel productive while doing it. We’re gaining information about current events and informing ourselves about issues we have a reason to be concerned about.

The problem is that we often keep going even after we’ve gathered the basic information we need. Like witnesses to a train wreck, we simply can’t pull our attention from the constant stream of disasters.

Why Do We Doomscroll?

Experts point to several possible reasons. For one, most of us felt disconnected during the pandemic, with our only remaining connections to the world coming from our devices. Even amidst all the bad news we could share it with our online friends and thereby reclaim a little of the connection we were missing.

We were also feeling confused and frightened, so we turned to the news for more information as a way to protect ourselves. The hope was that the more informed we were, the better we’d be able to handle whatever might come our way.

Strangely, doomscrolling can also help us feel safe. The riots are occurring in another city, not ours, we think. The death rates are higher in another state than in ours. It’s not that we don’t have compassion for others. We’re just scared and looking for ways to reassure ourselves.

Unfortunately, whatever the reasons for doomscrolling, it can become a bad habit that can easily derail your writing practice.

How Doomscrolling Messes with Your Writing Practice

1. Doomscrolling increases stress, which destroys creativity.

Exposing yourself to negative news on a regular basis increases your stress levels. According to a 2017 study, watching the news triggered persistent negative psychological feelings, including stress and anxiety. In a recent survey by the American Psychological Association (APA), more than half of Americans said the news caused them stress, as well as anxiety and insomnia.

Stress, in turn, is terrible for creativity. In a 2002 study, researchers analyzed more than 9,000 daily diary entries from people who were working on projects that required high levels of creativity. They found that stress, in the form of time pressure, resulted in less creative results.

If you’re regularly doomscrolling, you're hampering your creative muse.

2. Doomscrolling negatively affects your mood, which inhibits creativity.

It’s true that positive thoughts encourage creativity, while negative thoughts discourage it.

In one experiment, scientists found that a positive mood facilitated work on a project while a negative mood inhibited it. A later study found similar results—those in a positive mood produced higher creativity ratings than those in a neutral or negative mood.

Doomscrolling typically increases negative thoughts and feelings, worsening your mood and making you less creative.

3. Doomscrolling can create sleeping problems, robbing you of creative energy.

When you spend significant time scrolling on your gadgets, you expose yourself to blue light, which in turn, can mess with the sleep hormone melatonin. In 2018, researchers found that greater screen time was associated with insomnia and shorter sleep periods. Negative news, on top of that, can leave your mind reeling with worries and anxieties that can be hard to quiet down.

All of this causes next-day fatigue, which is definitely not conducive to writing. You know how it goes when you’re staring at the blank page with heavy eyelids—not good.

4. Doomscrolling creates a vicious negative cycle that increases anxiety.

“The more time we spend scrolling,” clinical psychologist Amelia Aldao explained to NPR, “the more we find those dangers, the more we get sucked into them, the more anxious we get. Now you look around yourself and everything feels gloomy, everything makes you anxious. So you go back to look for more information.”

Not only can this habit cut into your writing time, but it can also leave you in a state of mind that discourages creativity. Who wants to sit and write a story when it feels like the world is going up in flames?

“When uncertainty is high, it drives our brains to seek as much information as possible to feel in control,” says Jacqueline Bullis, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist in McLean Hospital's Center of Excellence in Depression and Anxiety Disorders. This can make us feel slightly better in the short term but ultimately has the opposite effect.

“In the long term, these behaviors are increasing our anxiety by feeding into this belief that if we have enough information, we can control what happens,” Bullis said. “The more we seek certainty over what will happen in the future, the more anxious we will feel.”

5 Ways to Stop Doomscrolling and Boost Writing Productivity

Nothing good comes from doomscrolling, so the only thing to do is to stop. Here are some tips to help you do that:

1. Limit your exposure to negative news.

Set aside a certain amount of time to check the news each day, and then refuse to go over that time. As to how much is too much? Go by how you feel after you’ve finished scrolling. If you notice an uptick in anxiety or negativity, you need to cut back more.

2. Choose to get your information only from trusted sources.

Be selective about your media. Rather than falling down negative rabbit holes online, watch and read the news only from your trusted sources, then let it go. Bookmark your trusted sites and vow to check them only once a day.

3. Remove anxiety-provoking leads from your social media.

If you follow people who are constantly posting negative news, it may be time to unfollow them or to at least hide them from your main feed. Feel free to explain that you're taking a break from negative news if you like, but don't worry too much about what others think. Your health and ability to write is what matters most.

4. Soak yourself in inspiring news.

As a writer, it is your responsibility to take care of your creativity. That means inspiring yourself as often as you can with music, art, walks in nature, photography, workshops, books, and more.

Rather than immersing yourself in negative news, make a point to surround yourself with inspiring resources of information and inspiration. Do so for just a week and you're likely to see an increase in writing creativity.

5. Unplug at least once a week.

Choose one day a week to avoid social media, the internet, and the news completely. Use that day to allow your mind to rest and recuperate. Take a notebook and head to the park for some quiet time. Make an afternoon trip to the library and see what you can find that might inspire you. Spend some quality time with your family, or take your dog for a walk.

Reconnect to the other things in your life that you love and watch your mood and your energy soar.

How do you avoid doomscrolling? Did you do this more than usual during the pandemic?

For more help managing your time and increasing productivity, see Colleen’s award-winning book, Overwhelmed Writer Rescue.Get your free chapters here!

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Sources

1. Amabile TM, et al., “Creativity under the gun,” Harvard Business Review, 2002; 80(8):52-61, 147.
2. Garcia-Navarro, L. (2020, July 19). Your 'Doomscrolling' breeds anxiety. Here's how to stop the cycle. NPR.org.
3. Heid, M. (2020, May 19). You asked: Is it bad for you to read the news constantly? Time.
4. How much news is too much news for good mental health? (2020, October 31). McLean Hospital | Mental Health Treatment, Research, and Education (Belmont, MA).
5. Mastria, S., Agnoli, S., & Corazza, G. E. (2019). How does emotion influence the creativity evaluation of exogenous alternative ideas? PLOS ONE, 14(7), e0219298.
6. Study links screen time to insomnia symptoms and depressive symptoms in adolescents: Regulating screen times may improve sleep health and reduce depression. (2021, January 12). ScienceDaily.
7. Szabo, A., & Hopkinson, K. L. (2007). Negative psychological effects of watching the news in the television: Relaxation or another intervention may be needed to buffer them! International Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 14(2), 57-62.
8. Vosburg, S. K. (1998). The effects of positive and negative mood on divergent-thinking performance. Creativity Research Journal, 11(2), 165-172.

About Colleen

Colleen M. Story inspires writers to overcome modern-day challenges and find creative fulfillment in their work. Her latest release, Writer Get Noticed!, was a gold-medal winner in the 2019 Reader’s Favorite Book Awards, a 1st-place winner in the Reader Views Literary Awards, and Book By Book Publicity’s best writing/publishing book of 2019.

Colleen frequently serves as a workshop leader and motivational speaker, where she helps attendees remove mental and emotional blocks and tap into their unique creative powers. Find more at her motivational site, Writing and Wellness, and on her author website, or connect with her on Twitter.