There is a balance between feeling enough pressure that you get something done and feeling so much that you are left without a clue what to write. I have been to both extremes and I’d like to find a comfortable position right in the middle.
I am proving to myself that I can actually decide to do something and then do it. If, along the way, I happen to accomplish something more, like writing a popular story or novel, then that is a happy surprise. I’ve started several writing projects. I’ve written fifty thousand words worth of novel on two separate occasions. That is not the whole story in either case. Both so-called novels need significant work done to them before they even deserve to be called first drafts.
The first was a novel called The Gentry. I started importing what I’d written into Scrivener. It has an impressive suite of tools for polishing a novel. I’m going to work on that for a while. It has sat on the shelf, so to speak, for three years now. I have some sense what the mistakes that I made were. The first thing I need to do is to read it and see just how bad it is. Then I will outline what I’ve got so I can start to clean it up and get rid of some of the pointless rambling and punch up the good parts so that they’re even better.
I’m going to go ahead and post this. It shows the rambling dialog that I’ve been having with myself lately. If nothing else maybe it is entertaining to see me waffle and squirm. Who knows. Maybe someday it will be famous as a peek behind the scenes of the writing of my first novel. You never can tell.
Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.