Killing Writer's Block. By Writing.

When you decide to do something (write, diet, exercise), it's never about not being able to do it, but always about how much you want to do it. After my two month hiatus, I'm finally getting back into the habit of writing every day. Before, when I was writing steadily and then had to take a break for whatever reason, I missed the characters and wondered what they're up to. (Does anyone else do that, or is that just me being crazy?) But this time, after the first month, I wasn't wondering enough, and then I wasn't wondering at all, and then I wondered why I was feeling blocked. Yeah. So last week I decided to get back on the ball with it. I started reading at the beginning to reorient myself and stopped myself from editing anything other than grammar issues. On Sunday, the opening scene was nagging at me, so I let myself go back and work on that. I think that might be a weekend reward for me. Write during the week, edit on weekends. (When did editing become a reward?) But I need to try something new, and if I can push off the vampiric editor for 5 days by telling him he gets free reign on the weekend, then hell, why not.

"From Where You Dream"

After reading two posts about this book, I picked it up at Borders on my lunch break today, and though I'm only a bit into chapter three, it's already made the hampster in my head spin his little ball into a hurricane. In the past 2 months, I've moved and had a number of family issues arise that drained me and put me into such a mental funk that I couldn't concentrate on anything, let alone write anything decent. I started to worry that I'd lost my story, that it had died in its third draft, and I was going to have to scrap it and work up the nerve to start something new and just stash this one under the bed to be opened and laughed at in the years to come. Then I came to chapter three of Butler's book, and it was on yearning. A page and a half into this chapter, I suddenly knew what my story needed. Three of my four main characters knew exactly what they wanted, but the fourth was eluding me, and her loss of direction was tied intrinsically to, and thus crippling, the needs and goals of the antagonist. But Butler's chapter got me seriously thinking about what she yearned for, what she needed more than anything, the one thing, that if she got it, she could die a happy old woman, and then I realized what it was, and how the antagonist is going to use that.
So after doing a little happy dance, I started going back through her scenes and peppering them. I'm not saying the battle is over; there's still plenty more work that needs to be done, but I found her internal motivator, and that makes me a very happy writer-gal. So thanks for those posts about this book. It made my hampster get back to work.

Hello and Welcome

My work in progress is Little Fish. It's my first novel, one year in the making thus far, and in its third draft. I created this blog mainly so that I can post on other writer/agent blogs non-anonymously, but I plan to update on LF's progress as much as possible.