I realized the other day that my blog archive was missing a tag for June 2026. I hadn’t made a single post for an entire month! 😳 I was still trying to write, draw, and even work on a new cosplay project. But I wasn’t really getting anywhere with any of it. I was stuck, and didn’t want to admit it because I had no idea how to get un-stuck.
To give a quick recap of what I did:
- ART:
- I made new art for some of the other main characters in my main WIP, the “Guardians of the Elements” story, complete with timelapse videos, and posted them on social media. I probably should’ve posted those here too, and possibly still will.
- I started making a couple more full-size scene drawings for various stories, but they just didn’t look right and they’re both still sitting in my unfinished art pile.
- COSTUMES:
- I had an idea for a pirate queen costume that I started making using several second-hand garments for materials, hand sewing in my room because my college’s makerspace wasn’t open at the hours I wanted to work on it. I made slow but noticeable progress, though for the amount of time & effort it took, it didn’t feel very rewarding.
- WRITING:
- I tried working on my main WIP, but aside from one successful burst writing a whole chapter in one go, it’s been a wall of writer’s block. I still thought about it every day, and kept trying even when I knew I’d most likely get nowhere, but the block persisted, and eventually I made myself actually put it down for the time being to preserve my energy.
- In a reassuring discovery that my writing brain itself isn’t malfunctioning, there was a single week where I wrote about four chapters in the middle of a secondary WIP in the same world, Seekers of the Unwritten. Didn’t help the main WIP though.
- Near the end of the month, I FINALLY I started putting some pieces together on why I was so persistently stuck on the one project that has captured my attention for about a year and a half. I’ll be posting a separate article covering that in more detail, but TL;DR, I’d stopped writing the story I originally wanted to write, and my initial attempts to course-correct were incomplete and insufficient. I thought I’d keep going to finish an extra-rough first draft and fix everything later, but part of me just refused to keep writing something that felt wrong, even knowing I could and would clean it up in the future.
On top of all of that, the last week or so has been full of lots of personal emotional issues & challenges, which I won’t go into in detail. I decided to take a break from social media altogether for at least a week while I’m working through all that, and it turns out that, if nothing else, doing so has given me back some time devote to catching up on stuff like this. Makes me think I ought to set stricter time limits on my apps on my phone… 😓
Anyway, this last month has been full of ups and downs, with more of the latter than the former, but I’m hoping the next will be better. At the risk of jinxing it, I do have some things I’m looking forward to sharing soon, maybe even within the next week!
In the meantime, stay awesome, stay nerdy, and stay uniquely you.
— Riverly 💫
