Well, clearly I stalled out during the conference. In my defense, I did actually stay pretty busy and made the most of the in-person face-to-face meetings, so I’ll give myself some space for grace. Admittedly, I actually sat down a couple of times to churn out some words, but the combination of the blank screen and the shame of having missed days had me deleting whatever I wrote and laying in bed instead. I’ll have a lot of chapters and words to make up if I’m going to hit the 50k goal by the end of the month, but there’s still time! There’s still a chance!
In part, I probably just need to make this easier. I’m already noticing I’m holding myself up to a certain quality standard, when the whole point is to break that habit and just get myself into a quantity mindset where editing can happen later, and the main goal is to just get words onto the screen, even if they’re deleted later. It’s that “editing as I go” process that holds myself back in my grant writing and manuscript preparations, where I have some ideal story in my head that I never end up getting out onto the screen because I’m mentally in the revising stage before I even have anything to revise. If that doesn’t make sense, you’re probably better at grinding out that first draft than I am!
Funny enough, I’ve also had a lull in my leisure reading, so I wonder if there’s also some correlation between consuming content and generating it? It might also just be a spurious correlation, where I read for leisure when I have “spare” time, and I also write more when I have spare time; the basis is having spare time for both, but they end up looking correlated from dependence through that shared variable.
I’m also just openly admitting that I’m not writing as much as I hoped. Earlier today, I confessed to not making any progress on a manuscript for which I’d promised to have some updates by now, and while it wasn’t surprising or really blocking anybody’s work from getting done, it felt good to just admit that I’d dropped the ball. It doesn’t feel good to not have made progress, but it felt somewhat relieving to just admit that I’m struggling.
So hopefully this can be the day that I get myself back into the swing of things, and make a renewed effort to build up the writing habit!
Lindsay K. Pino 