Today is the Thanksgiving holiday! Happy Thanksgiving, whoever you are. If you don’t celebrate, well, I do. :) It’s a tradition to go eat with about 30+ other people at my Mom’s house and that’s what I’m going to do. Since it only takes about 5 minutes of travel time to get there, I should have a nice chunk of time left for myself today, for which I’m grateful.
Because I have to write today. But I also have lots of Thanksgiving things to do, so although I’ll do some writing this morning, most of it will happen this afternoon, if I can resist the lure of a nap or the television.
At least for a little while.
The thing is, I kind of have to finish the book today, or by noon tomorrow, to reach the goal I’ve set for publication of this particular book. So I’m going to finish it even if it means I am very unhappy with the finish I give it.
I’m not sure any finish is going to make me happy at this point. I have the start of 7 different endings already and none of them work for me. Obviously my self-critic is on high-alert, and nothing is getting through.
That is why I’ve decided to finish it even if that means writing something that feels off. I can’t trust those feelings right now, because I can’t shake the self-critic.
(I had a book I did something similar with several years ago. I’ve since gone back and read some of the drafts that I had, and they were going along fine. There was no reason for me to keep deleting and restarting those sections, because they all could have led to a great story, and yet… I couldn’t stop doing it until I just made myself. That’s what I’m going to do here, today. Make myself move forward and stop the second-guessing.)
(The next afternoon… Yes, afternoon.)
Well, I guess I should have seen that coming. I added 5 words to my latest book yesterday. Just too much to do, then too apathetic to do anything else.
Becoming apathetic about one’s writing is not the key to success as an author. :-|
The time I did spend on the book all happened before I left the house for my family’s annual Thanksgiving get-together.
When I got back, I watched a couple of episodes of Ghosted, and then started cooking my Turkey. I’m just not even sure where all the time yesterday went. I do know that by 10 PM, I was very tired and decided to watch Killer Floods on PBS and nearly fell asleep several times before the show was over. Without a doubt, I missed a few bits of it.
As a writing day, yesterday was a disaster.
Today hasn’t been any better. I want to blame someone other than myself, but I can’t. I’ve had time—I have time right now. Yet, here I am. Instead of writing fiction, I’m writing this.