{"id":12329,"date":"2022-01-17T21:00:46","date_gmt":"2022-01-18T05:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/?p=12329"},"modified":"2022-01-17T21:00:46","modified_gmt":"2022-01-18T05:00:46","slug":"the-critique-group-boost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/?p=12329","title":{"rendered":"The Critique Group Boost"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>If you&#8217;ve been reading my posts over the last week or so &#8212; you haven&#8217;t been, but that&#8217;s okay &#8212; you might have seen a tendency towards depression and negativity.  I&#8217;ve just been feeling so down.  I prefer to be honest and fair, so whatever I&#8217;m feeling in the moment is going to influence the tone of these posts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is the main problem with writing a post every day.  Normally, when I&#8217;m feeling like my post is going to be less than positive, I can choose to not post anything.  This can go for days, weeks, or even months.  If you&#8217;ve ever looked at my archive and seen huge gaps, it&#8217;s mostly because I didn&#8217;t want to post something negative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Now I&#8217;m feeling quite a bit better, so this should be better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One of the reasons I&#8217;m feeling better is that I&#8217;ve been really active on a couple of projects.  I&#8217;ve printed most of the large pieces required for the next keyboard, and I&#8217;ve ordered the switches and wires and the microchip which will run the whole thing.  I watched some instructional videos, so I know how to wire this up.  I&#8217;m prepared!  When it&#8217;s all done, it may not be the prettiest, but it will be the most personal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Also, I realized that if I ever write an actual cyberpunk story, this completely custom keyboard is the instrument I&#8217;ll use to write it.  It makes me excited.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The parts I need to buy to build the keyboard are on order.  Also, the parts I need to finish upgrading my gaming PC are on order.  Multiple projects are moving forward at the same time, which feels like momentum.  It feels like I&#8217;m doing stuff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Beyond all of that, I had a really great meeting with the critique group on Saturday.  It isn&#8217;t just that they said nice things about my story.  They did say nice things, but I think getting to be part of a community hit me like medicine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;ve also been attending the Shut Up and Write groups, thanks to Mike Baltar.  During yesterdays&#8217; meeting, I worked on the revision of <em>Synthetic Dreams<\/em>.  I really want to get that to the point where I can share it.  Then I can move on to the next story.  Maybe that cyberpunk story.  Maybe the fantasy story I tried writing in 2011.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;m feeling better.  Hopefully this is a trend and I&#8217;ll feel good tomorrow, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you&#8217;ve been reading my posts over the last week or so &#8212; you haven&#8217;t been, but that&#8217;s okay &#8212; you might have seen a tendency towards depression and negativity. I&#8217;ve just been feeling so down. I prefer to be honest and fair, so whatever I&#8217;m feeling in the moment is going to influence the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12329"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12329\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12335,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12329\/revisions\/12335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}