I can forget, sometimes, how different the entire world feels when I’m writing regularly. How just making a tiny bit of forward progress every day can make everything feel full of promise and possibilities.

And yet I do forget, and I fritter my writing time away. Some of it on useful things (say, baking banana bread), some of it on fun things (look, someone built an Antikythera mechanism out of legos!) and some on pointless and/or self-destructive things (hello, Amazon rankings).

So on Jan 1 I did something slightly desperate and unplugged the wifi when I got up. Then I sat down and started my new project.

It was still tough. I hadn’t tried to write in a few weeks, and before that I’d been struggling with false starts. I wrestled with that blank screen for three hours, writing and deleting different openings. But finally, finally, I found a sentence I liked, and it led to another and another. And an hour after that I had a 600 word beginning. It didn’t feel anything like a book. It didn’t even feel like the dream of a possible one-day-maybe book. But it was a step forward.

Ten days later, my wordcount just hit 10019.

It’s finally starting to feel like it could really be a book. You know, if I can do this all over again, seven more times. Heh.

So good luck to anyone else out there taking small steps! You can do it!

On an only tangentially related note, here’s a quote I saw on twitter today that resonated very strongly:

The side of me which longs, not to write, but to be approved as a writer, is not the side of us that is really worth much. ~ C.S. Lewis

And last of all, hooray for all the winners of the ALA Youth Media Awards! I’m especially excited to see a sci fi book win the Printz (Ship Breaker by Bacigalupi)!

Tags: poison maid, writing