I ended up purchasing some noise cancelling headphones. (This helps tremendously, deafening distractions. Even with them on, sometimes noise leaks into my ear so I discovered some ambient videos and sound files help with drowning it all out.

There are also ambient ‘mixers’ that provide nature sounds, background café noise, or white noise sounds like fans, but I prefer mixing my own or the YouTube videos I’ve saved for specific writing projects.

defonic.com – pick and choose sounds (free). Nature sounds, white noise, and a cafe sound byte are all free. Some sounds require a membership and fee.

coffitivity.com – cafe background noise (free). Some sounds require a membership and fee. I can’t write in a cafe because it’s too distracting.

Ambient-Mixer provides tons of variety which I love. You can select pre-made sounds or create one of your own. Need sounds of a tavern for writing a scene in your fantasy novel? Need background noise of a spaceship for a sci-fi story? This site let’s you pick and choose.

I love how you can remove elements to the pre-made. For instance, I might not like the sounds of frogs near a lakeside and select a loon all instead.

YouTube provides tons of choices for ambience as wll. Ambiance Keepers’ Archive has some nice ones. I like the sound of a train for basic writing and use the videos of rain for overall relaxation.

Selcuk Celebi Ambient & Music provides background noise of spaceships, cyber cities, apocolyptic noise, and other sci-fi type atmospheric ambience. You might find some of the videos spark a story idea in you.

If there’s sounds specific to your needs, just use the search on YouTube and find some sounds that would fit.

It’s been a while since I posted on this blog, but my hope is to get back into sharing my writer’s journey. I’ve been helping to take care of my elderly parents. Between trips to doctor appointments, taking on adulting tasks, and enduring the parental relationships changing as they do when the child becomes the adult, well, let’s just say, it’s not easy. 

Currently, I’m enjoying the challenge of writing a short story each month. Not that I  plan on having full stories. I don’t need that kind of pressure. If anything, I want writing to be more creative fun for me instead of work.

Last December I jotted down some ideas for stories. Some ideas are not entirely flushed out, that’s why I don’t expect to finish it, but I’ll have the skeleton of a story worked on. Heck, I might work through the plot while I write. Either way, I’m writing more now than I did before.

I’m also focused on writing for myself, to just enjoy storytelling. Sometimes writing towards publication turns writing into work. It sucks out all the fun and creativity from the process. I want to get back into writing as a fun pastime.

Some tips I can offer with this challenge include:

• Embrace the challenge of writing a short story each month. Short stories are generally up to 10,000 words, or less. For zealous writers, you can easily do this in addition to other projects.
• Work on a different story each month, even if you don’t finish the story. The focus here is to get 12 ideas written through the year.
• Use prompts to spark some ideas for stories. I have a Pinterest Board with prompts for myself.
• Enjoy yourself. The challenge is for you and your writing. You don’t need to share or publish what you write.

I’ll post monthly of my process. If you join this, post in comments. I’d be very interested in hearing your journey.

The ideas keep coming though. As long as I can remember stories ran like movies in my head. Scenes and characters play out whenver I do some mundane chores, or drive the car, or listen to music. The stories keep bubbling up.

Franz Kafka once said “A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity”, which is why you should write no matter what. The writer in me, however, seems to fear failure enough to embrace that insanity of not writing.

This year has been stressful with being the primary caretaker of my parents as they go through the aging and health issues that come with it. This means tons of anxiety, tips to doctors, juggling a schedule, while my son graduates high school, and ‘real life’ keeps interferring with the writing life.

My cat died of cancer so that was weeks of caring for him with medicine, trying to get him to eat, and worry incessently about making ‘the decision’. You know what I mean if you own a cat or dog, that moment where you decide it’s time to put an end of suffering. No amount of justifying his age (15 years old) made the decision any easier.

My writer’s meetup group is also publishing this year. Our theme is science fiction. Normally, that’s the genre I love. This time, finding the idea for a short story took forever. I still waffle if I should stick with it or find something else, but I’m taking it as an exercise of ‘just do it’ and see what happens.

So what am I writing? I’m trying to get back into blogging regularly. To stop worrying about content and just share posts I’d like to read. That also goes for fiction. I work on various projects, but this week’s focus is on a sci-fic short story involving A.I., space pirates, and program vs humanity.

I’ll post an excerpt soon.

My theme this month is ‘just do it’ and try to get things done regardless of stress, anxiety, worry, lack of sleep, sorrow, etc. Just write, let the words flow, see where it leads.