Writing, The Small Victories

I finally finished the chapter/scene I’ve been working on for months now. It happened all at at once after many small sessions. The monumental effort it took to finish this chapter felt disproportionate to what it usually takes, but I know that’s not a unique case.

Last week a very good friend of mine called to throw down a writer’s challenge. She asked if I wanted to write for an hour at the same time she was and see what we could get done. I grabbed onto that hour as a if it were a bouy being tossed out into the vast ocean of my revision. I had to force myself not to look back at what I’d written in the chapter before and promised myself that I would go off of what I’d last left behind. Much as there were a few moments my brain wanted to tug me backward, to delete paragraphs for the sake of the exercise, I forced myself to write from what I had and finished the chapter/scene. It was a really great exercise because I know, in a very, very small way, it’s how I’m going to move forward with my writing this year. I won’t have the swaths of time I had before to write in. I will get an hour here and there and every minute of that hour will count. Some of those hours are going to be used for planning, but those hours that are for the writing need to be for the writing, full stop. That hour last week brought me back to the story and I was really, really grateful for it.

I want to spend some time this week thinking about just that. I can’t sit and plan what I will do when, as in knowing the amount of time for writing, revising, and querying I will have over the next few months. I just can’t yet because I don’t know what it will look like. However, I can make some notes about what I will do when I get there. I can make sure that my query tracker is completely updated again (received a few more rejections) and I can make sure that the notes for the next scene I want to revise are ready in my Scrivener doc. I can also make sure that my notebook with my notes for MS:TS is in a place I can easily reach for it when I need it. If I have everything set and ready for when I can drop into an hour to write, I know I will make forward momentum on my projects this year and continue to get closer to publication.

In case you haven’t been told today, you are more than enough.

With you in words, Nikole