Ugh. It’s one of those days.
I’ve sat at my computer for three hours this morning and eeked out…283 words. Every sentence I type feels wrong. I am divining for meaning and coming up empty.
This is not how books get written, I chide myself.
Although, actually, it is. Most days, I plow through 1,000 new words. Sure there are hiccups along the way, but mostly the work gets done. But then there are days like today where every letter is a boulder I’m dragging uphill.
These are the no-fun days.
There’s deadline pressure here: pressure that I am in the middle of a book and suddenly lost its direction. A need to step back and re-read and think about what’s next, but feeling the pressure of a deadline makes me feel guilty for taking that pause. I have to remind myself it’s necessary.
There’s also pressure on me as the storyteller. I fall in love with my characters as I write them. It’s inevitable, I suppose, since we spend so much time alone with each other. (Hell, I spend more hours of my day with my fictional Alphas than the Alpha I married.) My characters live in my mind and in my heart and in my soul. Am I doing them, and their story, justice.
And some days, if I am being brutally honest, my writing bores me. Oh just get on with it! I yell at myself. The boring muddle — er, middle — can feel like a gaping yawn in between the exciting bits of beginning and end. We can fix those but first, we have to slog our way through.
But today, boredom is not the problem! I am in the middle of writing the characters’ first intimacies and there’s nothing dull about that! I just feel blah and unfocused. Every shiny object that winks my way has my attention.
These are the days where I will sit here until I get my 1,000 words. It may take all day, but the ass stays planted until I hit my quota.