Friday--Day 5 of a Week to Write

Photo by Peggy Anke on Unsplash

I woke up feeling tired and with a strange cough. I suspect I’ll be napping today. My brain needs naps—short ones are best. Twenty minutes max.

Tired because of the subject matter of the novel? But perhaps that can be said of any novel that’s doing its job emotionally. Emotion has to be injected into it, and that costs writers. Its part of the job. (Next week a post on replenishing…?)

Possibly tired too as a result of the other part/s of my mind that do have to deal with the hound of promotion. Though I tend not to think “promotion”—I like to think “how does this story get out to the world?” But in the end, it’s the same thing, and there’s always a level of, at the very least, push to it.

I’ve decided to do some work with a publicist, and to get that rolling takes thought and energy. Each day there’s some piece of this. When I’m trying to focus on writing, I also try to keep all else to a minimum—but it is a juggling act, and a ball not in the air is the one rolling around your feet, and if you don’t know where it’s rolling it might just sprawl you somewhere. How to do this…

Feeling the good urge to just get to work. And set all else aside, at least for the next hours.

A quick re-cap of what yesterday accomplished and then I’ll do exactly that.

Those pesky chapter titles and another chapter-type element—a brief musical play-list for each—all got done. Yes, that’s passive, though it was not done passively! I was determined to complete the piece. But in the end, at times, it does feel as if it “got done” in a way that is a bit mysterious. That’s okay. I’ll take mysterious. Mysterious is a huge piece of all this work.

Also a piece of this end-times of the project: second-guessing, wanting to analyze—the “should this really be like this?” and “why?” Here I’m talking about where my characters have taken off—where they say words and make choices that have grown from their creation, not—it feels—from my creating at the present. It all feels a bit out of my control now. When you’ve created a character, they come to know what they’re about. And take off.

I’ve been long meaning to write a post about John Keats’ idea of negative capability, but keep putting it off.

“being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

I think of it as the developing of that capacity to accept the mystery, the beyond-our-control. I need to pay attention to the last half of the quote. And cease the reaching.

The rest of the day was spent reading and working through, finding those places of red font and struggling to turn them to black and ‘done.’ I printed the succession of character-written blog posts, and hope to complete them today.

Let’s revisit Keats’ idea soon.

Off to work now. I hope your Friday is whatever you most need it to be —