I hear the hammers. Chisels sound like they’re working rocks over. It’s the sound of Chuck Wendig chipping away at the preconceptions and sorry excuses that cake around the thick skull of the writer especially after a binge of wordsmithing like NaNoWriMo. He gave me a gift on my birthday, the gift of cold wisdom, of reminding me just how badly I could fuck this up.
I do like his advice on building up savings (and the liquor cabinet) while the day job is going on, but I should still be cramming more writing in whenever I can. Stealing it out of the piggy bank of Father Time while he’s out mowing the temporal lawn. Digging my fingers into the mud of my schedule and scooping out what bits of time I can to slap it onto this writing thing and see if it’ll finally stick.
Wait, am I sure that’s mud? Probably. Maybe. Smells funny, though.
Anyway, even if I did have or make more time, I’m unsure as to how I’d spend it, writing-wise.
I’m having doubts about the major novel rewrite. I’m debating taking the other novel in a different direction (down instead of up, novella serial instead of novel series, e-pub versus traditional) and my shorts are in the hands of editors who are pretty busy themselves. While I do have some other work lined up, the big things that I’ve long taken to be the solid core of where I want to go with this whole writing thing have lately come up as giant question marks.
Are these things worth pursuing, continuing, writing? Would I be better off sticking them in a folder somewhere and starting completely from scratch?
I guess this is the ‘wall’ runners often speak of. I’m getting that ‘seperates the men from the boys’ feeling. And I know it could be erroneous. So I’m going to keep trying to find and make the time to chip away at these things, one word and sentence at a time. Problem is, at the moment, I can’t help but feel a little adrift.
