Archives: September 2008

well, it’s progress, anyway

so this was not all i was hoping for following my post last thursday, full as it was of forward motion and great writing to catch up on the last week and a half of inactivity with No Good Deed. i’m not caught up, by any means (and the realization that if i were caught up, i’d be done right now only makes this harder to accept), but i did manage to get 6 pages written, about 3000 words, over the weekend.

also, thanks once again to the clear-thinking and patient listening of my live-in-muse (wife), i’m finally through a particularly sloggy section. i know it’ll take some work to clean up, but i’m feeling positive that the work is not wasted. there will be some timeline re-arranging and this too-long section will be cut into shorter scenes, but overall it’s still good material, so i can’t complain.

tomorrow, i try again.

reboot

today is thursday. it’s been 14 days since i last posted here, and 9 days since i last wrote anything for No Good Deed, and of those 9, 7 were workdays, meaning i’m 21 hand-written pages behind, according to my 3/workday policy. not a good recent history. i have no great excuses, and they wouldn’t really matter anyway.

it’s 7:45am and i’m going to catch up.

rule #4: have faith in yourself

it’s so easy to get down on myself, sometimes, as my previous post shows. very frustrating. and yet, it’s just as easy to get back up.

not that there wasn’t something to be put out about, though. monday, i hadn’t written anything, and tuesday i barely made 3 pages , and was unhappy with 1 of them. i went to bed on tuesday wallowing in the despair of not having any skill at this writing thing, and what am i really trying to prove, anyway… moreover, despite the total fabulosity of the bookfetish.org review that lifted me higher than a kite on monday, i remembered on tuesday that i had received another agent rejection letter for Witness last week, only futhering my downward spiral.

wednesday didn’t help a lot, count-wise. i only managed 2 pages, and i was still carrying 3 pages over from monday, leaving me 4 pages behind.

but today was an entirely different story (ha! get it? *sigh*). the 2 pages from yesterday got me around an obstacle, and today i ran with it, cranking out 7 pages, as of 5 minutes ago. a good day. AND i managed to water the garden and do a load of darks and whites, too!*

and how did all this happen? because, with help from my wife/muse, i remembered that i don’t believe i’m terrible at this writing thing, that i have a chance, and that i will continue.

when i started to tell her about the difficult storyline problem i’d been stuck on earlier this week, i realized i’d already fixed it. i also realized that wednesday’s work, while less than i’d desired, more than made up for it by revealing this solution. i had identified that i was forcing it, and i went through the steps to re-approach the issue, until i found the one that worked.

i believed i could do it, and i did it. it’s that simple. and that hard.

in regards to the rejection letter, it finally occurred to me that i had opened it in the middle of last week, but not really given it a second thought until my slump on tuesday. yes, it’s a rejection. so what? i had clearly forgotten rule #2. also, i have sent a note to another agent who requested an exclusive review of a partial some time ago, so this rejection actually frees me up to contact this other agent!

so, here i am, back on track (83% !!!), thrilled to be here, and sincerely hoping to actually learn some of these rules some day.

* well, the clothes still need to be folded, but they’re all washed and dried.

i failed…

…to complete my quota, today. actually, i failed to complete today’s and yesterday’s quota, today. i’ve taken the weekends off, but i intended to keep the 5 day week going. intended to…

but no writing got done, yesterday. it was labor day, it was a lovely relaxing day with my wife, i have no complaints about that whatsoever.

the problem is that today got away from me. i got 2.5 pages written this morning, which was excellent, but the rest of the day was given over to pre-first day of school work, which had to get done. so, this too had to be done, and there’s no point complaining about that, either.

now, though, it’s nearly 10, and an hour and a half of attempted writing this evening barely squeezed out another half page.* just enough to make 1 day’s quota, but not the required 2. i had given myself the option of carrying over one day’s work to the next, but only once in a given week. this is the first time i haven’t managed to stick to that.

and tomorrow’s the first day of school. that said, i’m quite excited to be getting back into the classroom. i’ve definitely missed it, and it will be good to be part of that process again.

* i probably would have been okay, actually, if i had realized earlier that i was stubbornly trying to force the characters and storyline again. they’ve got better ideas (they always do), and i really need to pay attention.