#violet pollux

[violetpollux]

Te di mi corazón, lo rompiste...

Y yo estaba feliz de que siquiera lo hubieras tocado.

Así de mucho te amaba.

(Así de poco me amaba.)

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[nanowrimo]

My NaNo Road Trip: Tackling the Terrifying Deadline, One Step at a Time

We’re off on the Great NaNoWriMo Road Trip! So far, participants like you have helped us raise over $47,000 of our $50,000 goal to fund a redesign of the NaNoWriMo website. We’ve asked NaNoWriMo participants around the globe to tell us about their journeys along their own creative highways. Today, participant Violet Pollux shares how they face the pressure of deadlines, both in writing and in life:

The deadline: it could be classified as an authentic torture method. Yet, at the same time, it’s that supportive voice at the back of your head that urges you to keep on writing.

I’ll be completely honest: pressure sucks. I hate it, even when I give create great things because of it. I study two careers in two universities, so I’m no stranger to pressure. I’m a musician in an orchestra that has rehearsals from Monday to Friday, and, as if that wasn’t enough already, I write. If you asked me how I manage to do everything, I couldn’t give an exact answer, a realistic one, but there’s one thing I do: I try to see the road step by step.

I’m used to having deadlines one right after the other, and sometimes they’re so demanding that I start to think I won’t finish on time, that I won’t make it. Pressure is something that can motivate you to keep on the track, but sometimes, the anxiety it generates could actually take you to the opposite direction.

My secret for not letting the pressure of the deadline kill me and my dreams and my mental health? I ignore it. I forget about it. I act as if it didn’t exist at all.

I write because I love writing. I study because I love studying. I play an instrument because I love playing it, and the point is that that love should be the motivation to do those things, not a deadline. I mean, a deadline is awesome, it keeps you writing… but sometimes you focus on it so hard that you forget that the main reason why you’re doing this is because you love it.

NaNoWriMo 2016 was the hardest for me. I was at half of the month and didn’t even have 10K words written–I was about to lose my mind! I thought I couldn’t make it, but then I just sat down and wrote because that’s what I love doing, not because I was putting pressure on myself to get it done. In that weekend I wrote about 12K words. Why did I write that many words in so little time but didn’t in the days before? Because in that weekend I only focused on two things:

I was writing because I loved it, not because of anything else.

I only cared about the next word, the next paragraph, the next scene, the next chapter.

Big things are done by little tiny steps, and those are the ones we should focus on. One thing that NaNoWriMo has taught me is this: If you focus on the next small step you have to do, and just forget about the rest of the world in the meantime–magic happens, and you finish on time.

I know how horrible it is to fight anxiety and stress and to constantly be under pressure–I live that daily. But, do you want to know what I discovered recently? Most of times I don’t succeed on things, it’s because of… well, me.

Sometimes I’m the one who stands in the way to my own success, and now that I’m aware of it, I’ll try not to do it. I hope you try not to do it, too, if that was your case.

And, if you asked me for advice on writing, or life itself, I’d tell you this:

Don’t let yourself be the stone on your own road. Don’t let yourself be the reason why you don’t succeed. Don’t let your thoughts bring you down, because you’re stronger than you think–and trust me, even if you can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, you can do this, you will do it, because you’re capable of that and so much more.

Violet Pollux is a poet, writer, musician–or simply an artist. They live in Venezuela, where they were born and currently study Medicine and Educational Learning Disabilities. They dream of being an LGBTQ+ activist someday. Violet writes mostly in Spanish, their mother tongue, but also writes in English. You can find them on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, and you can follow their blogs: they have one in English and one in Spanish.

Top photo by Flickr user j_arlecchino.

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[violetpollux]

Verdad O Beso: una colección de relatos gratuita

Lee gratuitamente "Verdad O Beso", una colección de relatos, en PDF, Wattpad o tu tienda digital preferida. Adquiérela aquí :)

¡Hola! Espero que estés bien. Como ves en el título, hoy compartiré contigo una colección de relatos 😀 Estos relatos son extraídos de mi trilogía “No Me Dejes Ir”, la cual está disponible en tiendas digitales y en físico mediante en Amazon. Quería hacer este libro para celebrar que la tercera novela de la trilogía, “De Vuelta A Casa”, cumplió 1 mes de publicada el 22 de noviembre de 2021, que…

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