Maria Stiehler | Unsplash
January 11, 2017, and this is not where I thought I would be. I had an idea for a novel, had the general outline, and intended to start writing in October. The schedule was too busy, no problem, November.
*Except* when November came, I hit the writing road the way I always do. Flat on my face. Splat. I couldn’t get the first pages to work. So I wrote and deleted and wrote again…and got 10 pages that were passable and workable.
Sent it off to my publisher and said, “What do you think?”
“Great! Looking forward to the rest of the novel!”
*Except* those pages don’t work. At least, not for the start of the novel.
More writing, more deleting.
In the meantime, I’m trying not to panic as November rolls into December, and December ticks down to January. I know writing is a winding road. I know there are millions of stops and starts, but all I could see was time counting down.
On a good day, I can get in 8-10 pages. Those days saw me at 150 words or less. And still I wrote, and still I deleted.
Today, I’ve got 30,000 words deleted and 358 words written. I’m trying not to panic, not to give into frustration, to just concentrate, let the writing be the writing, and put one foot in front of the other and see where the writing road takes me.
