Phew. Life the past couple of weeks has been both completely bonkers, and simultaneously motionless. Had a brief COVID scare when B-Bug developed cold symptoms and a fever, but his test came back negative, thank goodness! With an under 1yo at home and grandparents over 60, the doctor recommended getting tested. SO THAT HAPPENED. Thankfully, this time was a false alarm, and the fever resolved on its own, no ear infection either. (B-Bug would like you to know that the nasal swab is not fun, but LEGO sets make it better.)
Then we’ve been prepping for the holidays, trying to get XMAS shopping done early so we don’t have to worry about shipping times, and I got word that I sold a story! WOO! I’m also wrapping up the Creative Writing 1 class via the AWC, which will end this week, so I’m scrambling to find time to squeeze in a bit of writing.
Tried writing a few thousand words this weekend, and it. was. terrible. Like pulling teeth, only worse. I felt like I was just treading water on the surface of the story, not getting any depth or character development, just dumping words for the sake of dumping words. A smidge better than word-salad, but only a smidge. I need to figure out how to harness the focus I get when I work on class assignments that somehow seem to turn out far superior scenes… Sigh.
At any rate, I did write yesterday, and managed to hammer out a very short rough draft of a new story that just kind of hit me at bedtime Sunday night (of course). I’d typed out (with the thumbs!) a brief bit to capture the essence, and then gone to sleep, so I translated that over and completed it. And as for the novel, I went back and chopped out all 6,500 words I’d added over the past few weekends and tossed them in my SCRAP file, and wrote 300 words of maybe not quite so crappy scene? We’ll see.
This week, I need to finish up my coursework and get back into the baseline habit of writing at least a little bit every day, even if it’s just a sentence. I think my gears freeze if I don’t keep them moving at least a little bit on a regular basis, and that tends to make it much harder and less satisfying when I do get a larger chunk of time to work.