Mine are the best.
I’m not bragging, they just are.
Okay, I’m bragging a little … a lot? Maybe.
We do find reasons not to write “today” or “right now” and we tell ourselves those reasons are valid. And if they aren’t, well, they’re one offs, they won’t happen again. Or if they do we’ll know better than to use them next time, we’ll think up other excuses instead.
Now I know
I’m supposed to be working on my novel. And I know I appear to be on a break.
The truth is, I’m not on a break, I’m just not working on my novel.
And it happened like this …
I write for a living, and no, I don’t mean my novel. I’d be dead from malnutrition if that were how I supported myself.
The things I write are fast and pointed, novels are gentle and subtle and move great amounts of information slowly and precisely into your brain.
Think of writing as the whole of nature
Novels are like running water, eroding away ignorance at a steady pace.
What I write for a living is more like lightning. A strike of information and then the words are gone.
What am I saying?
I’m not saying that I can’t write a novel, I’m (still just) two thirds of the way through doing just that.
But when I sit down to write, in thirty minutes I can do a complete post for someone who will pay me, I can get some of my next radio show script completed before its deadline looms any closer, I can fulfill my obligations to the various groups I belong to and write for … or I can write somewhere between one and five pages of a novel.
It’s not hard to see the advantages of setting the novel aside yet again.
Add to that …
The other issue is that it has been months now since I’ve worked on that novel. Thirty minutes wouldn’t get me re-familiarized with the first chapter. (I read slowly, about the same speed as I write if you must know.)
And I am a stickler for details. I would have to read the whole thing through at least two or three times before I started writing again. I’d need to reacquire the voice of the narrative, reassess the positions I’d left my characters in, reintegrate the story line into my mind.
When I stopped writing I did so because there was things changing in my life, work to do, I was not in the right place to continue telling that story.
But lately?
More things are on the horizon, I won’t mislead anyone. Changes have occurred and continue to occur. But I have to say I miss the characters in my story. I want to know what happens to them, they’re a good group and they deserve to be finished with the conflicts they found set in their paths.
But I’m still not writing yet.
I have a good excuse. In fact, it’s the best excuse.
I’m not writing because … I’m too busy writing.
