A Dry Well

A little late for my word count weigh in this week. I'm on track with 52,640 words so far. A couple thousand a day and I should hit 60k right on time. I'm starting to see the end of the story as well, so hopefully it won’t need much more then 60k to be done.

Then after this story is done I'm going to be taking a little vacation from writing. not a long one. I'm not running away, but I have realized with this book that I'm not a super human fiction creating machine.

I started off the year with a plan. I was so excited about this that I leapt right into it and made my first goals with no problem at all. I then did the next logical thing, I doubled my goals. In stead of getting one book edited and two more written, let's try to get two books edited and four written!

Now I'm paying the price.

At first it was fine. I was humming along, keeping right to my schedule. Then things started happening. My mom got sick and I had to go take care of her, still I got my word count done. I've had to change/increase my hours at work, still I got my allotted pages edited for that day.

Thing is, to get those pages edited and that word count goal met I had to give up other things, like watching tv (I've had the same Netflix movies sitting on my DVD player for nearly a month now), knitting and reading. All those things that are fun to do and relaxing. More then that, all those things fill my creative well.

At the beginning of my grand plan for the year I started with a full creative well that was brimming with ideas. But then I stopped filling it and now it's running dry. I'm still stubbornly typing out the last of this story, but the heart isn't there. I can feel the difference. I don't think the writing itself is all that bad, but the joy of forming it there has faded. Without that full creative well, everything gets dry and cracked. It loses its luster and shine.

So as soon as this story is done, I'm going to postpone the next project for a several week or a month and take a good long vacation. I've got a brand new Kindle and I want to make a good chunk in the list of books I've downloaded (as if I don't have enough physical books sitting on my shelf to be read). I'm going to watch as many movies as I can and finally finish knitting that sweater that I keep putting off.

Then, after I'm good and rested, I'll come back to writing, full and ready to dive in again. Sometimes not writing isn’t lazy, it’s necessary.