Back At It

So I've decided to revive this blog. Because every writer suffers from writer's block at some point in time. Or every day. Or every two hours?

And I'm no stranger to the challenges that come with trying to corral the thoughts in my head into something cohesive and meaningful. I do that every day in my freelance work, but more often in my personal projects. Especially when it comes to fiction.

Right now I'm hard at work on a book project and I'm making myself keep the focus. It's a creative non-fiction book that's meant to be a humorous memoir of sorts, and I'll be interested to see what's actually there once I finish my first draft.

So what happened was, I was bobbing along rather stupidly and then I took a time out. I looked at my freelance life, and realize that my process always goes like this:

1. Outline
2. Write
3. Read
4. Edit

As I was doing my freelance work I was not reading very much as I was going along. I was just getting my general thoughts together and letting them flow. THEN I came back to read and edit, AFTER I got the stream of consciousness stuff out of my psyche.

So why was I mushing everything into one step while trying to write a book? Why that's silly, I said to myself. Stupid really. My writer friend who is very prolific said, "Just write!" Well, I needed to do step 1 first. And then I need to just write.

I sure was stubborn.

And I tell you it's the darndest thing. Once I put down a quick outline and started "just writing," I actually started...writing. And now I'm somewhere around 32,000 words into my book.

So as I continue to stumble my way through this whole aspiring author thing, I'm going to keep chronicling my activities. My stresses, my feelings, my dramatic crumbling of printer paper (ok, hitting of the delete button is probably more accurate). And at some point I'm going to be successful at this thing.

In the meantime, I'm reading another really awesome book about writing fiction, because that is going to be my next foray once I get a solid draft down of my current book. It's called Making Shapely Fiction and it's one of the best books I've read so far. It's actually starting to spark some ideas for me. Check it out!