Holy smokes, I’m writing a novel!

It took over everything. Every waking moment for the first week of April was dedicated to writing or thinking about my novel. I didn’t plan out the story ahead of time. I had a basic plot and started to write. By the second week I had run out of ideas. The plan hadn’t magically appeared before me and I knew I’d have to pause the writing and work it out. I did and the plan bloomed beautifully in a couple of moments of brilliance. The general plot fell into place. I picked my hubby’s brain for the nitty gritty.

It took over my life and was stressing me out. Errands, chores, my happiness project and the hubby were abandoned to make the daily word count. I struggled and stressed and stalled. The stress oppressed my creativity and it all came to a screeching halt. I had to make a decision. Either force myself to continue to write every night and risk the inevitable abandonment of the project from lack of creativity or limit writing to the weekends and give myself breathing room. It meant falling drastically short of my final word count goal. Stopping wasn’t an option. I’d come too far for that. And I wanted it too badly. So I decided to limit the writing to the weekends. Four hours in the morning on Saturday and four hours in the morning on Sunday. The rest of the week to be dedicated to reading mystery novels and brainstorming story ideas.

The third week of April was calm. I brainstormed during the week and wrote on the weekend. The words flew easily. I felt like I was uncovering the story rather than spitting words onto the page and hoping they made sense. I felt relieved. I started meditating (which was one of my happiness project goals for April). And while I’ll fall short of my word count goal by the end of the month, it doesn’t matter. This was the push I needed to get back to what I love, writing. This was the push I needed to plunge into story writing and to finally publish one of them. I’m happy and proud of myself and very excited.