Stuck

It should come as no surprise, given my lack of recent blog posts, that the writing is not going well.

Actually, it's beyond "not going well". The writing's not going, period.

Sure, there are some real-world factors at play. Work's picked up, and I now have a tutoring gig #3. This is a good thing, since we could certainly use the money. But I'm not getting those two-hour stretches of uninterrupted time anymore. After several weeks of insomnia, my body rebelled and I slept every moment I could for a week. And the world has provided plenty of bad news to distract me.

But really, the problem is that I'm stuck. It's not that I don't know what comes next; it's more like I feel like I can't write what comes next. I've lost faith in the story. I don't even want to think about it, because when I do, all I feel is a rising panic that I've wasted years of my life toiling over a novel that is irredeemably bad.

Ugh. I hate this. I've been here many times before. But this time, I don't want to let this dark period cost me more months or years of progress. I've had a few weeks of a break from the book. I'm reading a lot, which is the best thing for me-- it fills the well and gets me excited about fiction in general. The next step is to sloooowly start working on EN again, in as low-pressure a way as possible.

So here I state my pathetically modest goal: today I will open the EN file, and work for 15 minutes on some aspect of it. If I can't face going back to the scene where I floundered, that's fine; I can work from my list of little changes. But I need to touch the book every day, to keep reminding myself of what the book is and what I want it to be, so that when I find my way out of this creative desert to the green lands beyond, I can just plunge right back in and start moving forward again.