I have always been notoriously bad at keeping any kind of regular log. When I look back over my diaries and journals, I find months and sometimes years between the entries.
And here I am, running a blog. As you can see if you scroll down, it mirrors my journals, with fits and starts months and years apart. But today, I made a resolution to change all of that.
It’s not just for my audience. It’s for me. Because this is such an important time in my life, and I want a record. I want to look back on this, years from now, and say, wow, these are the thoughts I was having when I embarked on this crazy journey to be an Indy author. This is what I was doing.
So what am I doing? Writing, of course. Today, I finished chapter 6 of Book II. I wrote for about three hours solid, which is about what my wrists can take. It was two scenes or about 2500 words. That brings my chapter count for Book II to 9 out of 16 (I’ve been skipping around a bit), or 64,000 words. I started drafting this in June.
Chapter 6 is a very exciting chapter. Things that have been simmering for the first part of the book start to really boil. Tensions are high, slings and arrows are cast, and the story lumbers onward. As usual when I write, I had a hard time getting started, but once I got into it, I really started smoking.
There is a thing that happens when I write, and it is really why I write–a feeling opens up inside of me, and I am alive in a way I’ve never been alive doing anything else. The emotions of the characters, sometimes scary and foreign, fill me and I become the characters. I imagine it’s like being a really good actor. You don’t just act the part, you embrace it. You feel it in every cell in your body.
Today was a good day. They aren’t all good days. There are days when the words are constipated, when they drip out like pitch, when the ADD has me up and down from my chair so often that it’s amazing I write anything at all. Then there are the day job days, when I pull myself out of bed too early and get into the flow of writing just in time to have to get up and go to work. Don’t worry, I’ll write about those days too, as they come.
Today was a good day. I’m even feeling that I might write more tonight, when my wrists and mind have rested. I probably won’t. But the feeling that I want to, that’s a good feeling.
