Daily Progress Report

Til Death: 140

Daily Goal: Not Met

Okay, so today did not go well in terms of writing.  I’m low on sleep courtesy of the puppy who doesn’t believe in sleeping for longer than a couple hours at a time.  I’ve been real busy at work.  And the puppy requires way way more actual attention than I am accustomed to giving to make sure that he doesn’t have any accidents in the house.  Our other dogs are ragingly jealous.  Daisy is disappearing and being antisocial and Angel is demanding other attention.  Which all makes it hard to get laptop time.

I’ve been totally uninspired today.  So I thought, well maybe I can do some plotting.  And, well, it hit me.  Other than having a smashing time pushing Marin and Wyatt together, I don’t have anywhere NEAR enough of an idea about what else happens.  I’ve got a bunch of different plot threads that wind up complicated and convoluted and…weak.  I’m bored with the rest of my plot.  And I know why…

There’s no suspense.

I mean I’ve got a killer and dead bodies, but it all happened in the past.  The suspense, as I have it laid out now, doesn’t really happen until the end.  And that’s just not gonna work.  So I am taking a few days to think about how to spice things up.  Make the threat more immediate.  Which means…being back to almost square one.

Shudder.  Cringe.  Weep.

But I think it’ll be a better book in the end, even if I don’t manage to finish it by January 15th.  Who knows.  Once I figure out what the heck I’m doing, maybe I can make up for lost time.  I can keep a fair amount of what I’ve written thus far.  I just need to adapt it.  God help me.

2 thoughts on “Daily Progress Report

  1. Don’t make yourself crazy with goals while all this stuff is coming down on you! I wish I remember where I read this, so I could give the author credit. But it said (and I paraphrase), “If you can’t write a chapter, write a scene. If you can’t write a scene, write a page. If you can’t write a page, write a paragraph. If you can’t write a paragraph, write a sentence. If you can’t write a sentence, write a WORD. And if all you wrote today is a word, you still wrote today.”

    By giving yourself permission to write a single word and call it progress, you can sometimes jumpstart those down periods. I’ve never stopped at a word, or even a sentence. But on some days, if I’d sat down thinking I had to finish a chapter, I wouldn’t have sat down.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.