Procrastination

You know, sometimes I'm glad I don't have a publisher or agent yet because I'm pretty sure deadlines would kill me. In the past month I've written maybe two pages. Seriously. I'm in a huge writing rut. My manuscript is so close to finished. I've got my character into a quite a big mess and now I have to figure out how to get her out of it so I can end this thing. The creativity gods, like Santa with a naughty kid, have skipped my house entirely. Keyboard, meet forehead.

Now, a list of things I've been doing instead of writing:

1) Playing Plants vs. Zombies (I'm on level 5)

2) Watching Sons of Anarchy (season 4 is a.mazing)

3) Playing crib on Pogo

4) Playing Scribblenauts on my iPhone

5) Trying to win a trip to Cuba on Q104

6) Facebook

7) Being a Mom (tending sickies, meal prep, cleaning, spending money, counting slowly to 10)

8) Organizing my desk

9) Pushing the cat off my desk

and...

10) Reading other people's books while avoiding my own


I suck.

Wow, it's been ages...

I'm 62k+ in on Out of Nowhere with just two or three more chapters to go. Writing this book has been been both extremely rewarding and exceedingly frustrating. It's easy when the words and ideas come freely and so hard when they don't. I love my characters and just want to do right by them. Sometimes I have trouble saying what I want to say. Other times I spend hours debating on one plot point or another. Should he do this? Should she say that? Where do I go from here?

Ugh. The life of a writer. Still, I wouldn't change it for anything.

Out of Nowhere

I'm 6000+ words into my work-in-progress Out of Nowhere. It's slow going, really slow...I had writer's block for months and couldn't get into a groove to save my life. All it takes to get going again is one little flicker of inspiration, which I got on Sunday. I've written a couple of thousand words since. School ends next week so I have to get as much in as I can before my house is filled with kids again.

I'm completely in love with this book. I'm having a blast writing it. My first two manuscripts involved the same characters, so it's really nice writing different ones and trying new things. I want this novel finished by January so I can enter the Amazon Breakthrough Novel contest for the third year in a row. That my goal again this year, to have a book finished, revised, query-lettered, and ready for the contest.

Happy writing!