Confession time

/

I have been woefully neglecting the blog since mid December and I was trying think of the best way to  jump start things.  Over the last couple of day I have thought about writing.

  1. A mawkishly sentimental post in memory of Coach Dean Smith. I'm not really a sports fan, but I am a Tarheel bred and I do support social justice. I have a lot of feelings on the death of this great man. 
  2. A scolding post about how outrageously SICK I am of the whole 50 Shades phenomenon.
  3. A thoughtful and referenced post about how Outlander can teach us more about true BDSM than 50 Shades ever could.

My friend Wendy over at  A Thoughtful Reader gave me a great opportunity with a Liebster Award, and I will get to responding to that very soon (No, really).  However, I thought first that I should talk about the thing that is dominating my thinking at the moment, which is...nothing and everything, but above all NOT Cauldron. And for that I am very sorry. 

I came out of NaNoWriMo full of excitement about having managed to achieve the kind of daily word goal that would let me see the light at the end of the tunnel of this thing. I meant to keep my daily word goal up through December and I did for part of the month. Then the holidays came along and life got busy. I told myself that as soon as the kids went back to school, I would return to a 2k/day word goal and be ready for revisions this month, in my editor's hands before April and in readers hands at the beach this summer. 

I started with the best of intentions. Sat down at the keyboard and hoped to write. Sadly hope does not make words multiply. I have met that 2k/day word goal exactly once.  I would love to blame it on snow days and stomach viruses, science fairs and whatever other distractions I could come up with, but the truth is I just haven't been able to put the words down. I can see the whole plot in my head laid out like a story board, but somehow I can't make the words work. 

I can hear other unsympathetic writers now. You know the ones I'm talking about. Those writers that post 10K word days in November. They're saying, "Just get the words down. It's a rough draft. They don't have to be good words. That's what revision is for." I get that. I totally do. The thing is I like pretty words (and ugly ones in the right context). I have never been one of those writers who can pants out thousands of words as a stretch. A novel length work is a hard slog and when the words are bad, the momentum slows down. 

And into that gap steps the inner hater. The one that tells me every mistake I'm making, not just about writing or not writing, but blogging, marketing, all of it.  Some of them fixable, some not. And the writing becomes even harder. So, at the moment, I'm just trying to get in as many words as I can each day and telling that inner hater that he's wrong and there's not wrong of right, there's just getting it done. Every word is a step in the right direction. My goal is still 2k/day, but I will be trying very hard not to hate myself on the 500 word days. or the days that I can't write at all because I'm taking care of a sick child. 

Fortunately, I'm not alone in this. Even the best and brightest of us has that inner hater. Here's a video from the always insightful Jay Smooth.