I can’t believe it’s less than a week till Christmas. Where has the time gone? I entered into December high on my success in NaNoWriMo, determined to finish a first edit of my manuscript by Christmas and look at me now, I am totally procrastinating. I have only today started editing, and have only finished the first chapter.
I do have an excuse. I have lots of excuses. I work full time. I have two young kids. I had to get ready for Christmas. It is always possible to find excuses not to write or edit. But that’s not good enough. I was able to write 130k words in November – and although that was slightly insane, I did like the routine of getting up before the rest of the house to write for an hour each day. Just that bit of time with my book each morning set the tone for the day. It allowed me to do something for myself first, give priority to my dreams. So why did I stop doing that as soon as my book was done?
The problem was that I needed some time away from my book. I find that when I am so close to the story, I can’t see what needs to be changed, so stepping away from it for a bit helps me get a better focus. But at the same time the break in momentum made it so much harder to pick up the routine again. I had planned to write some short stories in the meantime, but never did.
A lot of writing advice tells you to write every day. Even if it is just something silly, something short, something irrelevant. And that is such sound advice. If you ignore all other advice, at least take this away. Because as soon as you stop writing it becomes SO much harder to pick up the habit again.
For me this means that I am back in the saddle and I will continue editing my book until it is ready for my alpha readers. And then I will write short stories and work on my next novel. I truly mean to keep up the momentum this time…