47,819 words. I know. I know that number hasn’t changed since my last post. Things are getting…rough. That word that I hate is starting to creep up my spine, telling me that I can’t finish, that I won’t finish, that I shouldn’t finish. Doubt. I am beginning to doubt myself…
I’m losing it. I was there guys, I swear. I was in the zone. The perfect writing zone where you can see yourself finishing your book in a couple of weeks. Sure, you have a mountain of revisions, but you’re close to the end…so close that your fingers keep wanting to type, THE END, at the end of each chapter.
But now I’ve lost it. I’ve lost some of my joy—for the past couple of days writing has felt like torture.
I hate that word. Torture. I use to roll my eyes at my Writer’s Digest when I read about a famous author’s writing angst.
“It’s not brain surgery,” I use to think to myself. “There are real people out there suffering and they’re complaining about writing? Shame on them!”
And now, shame on me. I look at my calendar, my word goal scribbled in a black Sharpie, and my heart feels with dread. So I cover papers over it—my daughter’s latest Crayola creation, a Victoria’s Secret catalogue, a Weight Watchers magazine—anything that will block out the promises I made that I would write that day.
So when I straightened my desk this morning and I see the total word count I had for the end of this month, my stomach plunges. I’m nowhere near that. What happened?
I didn’t feel like writing on those days. And now, I’m kicking myself for not making myself write. I’m a newbie, but with two books under my belt I do know this—the more you write, the more you feel like writing. Writing everyday kept my characters fresh in my head. I was excited to know what they were going to do that day. But now, since I haven’t written anything in awhile, I’ve lost touch with them. It’s sort of like when you’ve haven’t called a good friend in a long time. You’re next phone call is spent just catching up. But if they’re a good friend, you find that when you do catch up, you don’t miss a beat—it’s like you talked to them yesterday. So that’s what I plan to do with my WIP—get back in the groove with my characters and treat them like a good friend. Like I talked to them yesterday.
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