Two Ways to Move Forward

Photo by Albert Stoynov on Unsplash

We’ve had snow here for the past week…

I’ve been writing 1000 words a day since the end of December. I started with a little more than 10,000 on a teen novel that I started two years ago, and on the day Jimmy Carter died to this world, I felt inspired to finish the thing (spoiler: President Carter has a role in it); I do like to pull together a first draft so I have something to work with. Especially when I don’t know where I’m going.

I’m also motivated to finish this project because I have the adult novel I began some months ago. And it sits, waiting. Maybe this is how I work now: several years ago, I was in a similar space, mid-adult-novel, and life tossed me an idea for a children’s novel, that seemed to come with a deadline of sorts. I wrote the two in tandem, as I am now.

Ah, but maybe “two” is not a pattern. We’ll see.

One thousand daily words is doubled what I prefer. At half that, my pacing is doable. I can do my household things, and other small pieces of writing. But with a daily deadline like this I have days of discouragement.

The problem is that if I miss a day, or even partially, the number seems insurmountable. Also, if I have a day (and I seem to average one of these weekly) in which I double that number or even more, then the next day or two seem impossible. It becomes very easy to lose the flow after having such so-called “good” day of more than the required… Funny how that works.