At the end of April I finished a project I was working on. It was a full novel and I was super excited about it. It was fun to write and hopefully will stand-up to being read. I finished it on the first morning of vacation, so I didn't expect to write much for the rest of that weekend.
And then it happened.
I had planned on jumping back into my not-a-rock-star-any-longer story. So I brewed on it. Thought on it. Reread it. But didn't write a darn thing. Bit of a slump, I thought after the first week. Just coming down off that finished-book high.
By the 13th I was getting worried. I hadn't written a word all month. I wasn't going to hit my monthly word goal, THAT was for sure! (The creeping panic of I'm never going to write again was screaming in my head, but I'll ignore that.)
Then I saw a submission call retweeted about an alien romance. I happened to have an alien romance that I wrote yonks ago. It was roughly 2k and pretty much skipped all of the story except them meeting and the fun alien sex. So, hey, I already had a basic plot! I could write that. Not fret about it too much, get me writing again.
Golden.
Right?
Well, it sort of worked. I wrote a little, then a little more, then a little more. All told, I wrote just under 4K. And then I heard about a holiday submission call, and was like this alien story isn't due until later, let me work on THAT. And I wrote just over 6K.
In the end, I met my word goal for the month (I snuck in with 10,003) and I have two possible stories started. They might both be terrible and uninspired (one is definitely depressing), but I wrote. And that's a big step of the process--because once you start writing, it's easier to continue. It's that lethargy of not writing that drags you down.
Or at least drags me down. I don't write every day, but getting out of habit of exercising my writing gives me weak writing--in that there isn't any writing at all.
To my brother: Yeah, you were right, I did it.
No comments:
Post a Comment