Wanted: Kick In The Pants

I started off November kicking butt.  I had a really strong first week and a half on NaNo before real life set in, as it always does.  I have continued to kick butt on all the lecture writing, to the point that I’m down to one lecture (which I hope to be finishing this afternoon).  I stalled out on the novella about a week and a half ago and have pretty much avoided it ever since.  My brain has, instead, insisted on traipsing off to visit old projects, resurrecting assorted loved books that were abandoned in the Dreaded Valley of the Shadow of the Middle, revisiting them and working to apply all the story structure stuff I’ve learned this year.  I’m falling back in love with the book I was writing last year, as well as the Christmas novella I worked on before that.  And that’s all well and good if I decide to shift gears in January and work on one of those before I write Draft 2 of HiS.

But for the love of Pete, I really must get back to this novella.  I must buckle down and finish.  Since I need a hand getting back into the routine of daily writing, I’ve signed up for another Novel Push Initiative.  The founder, Nick Enlowe, is hosting a Laid Back Edition of Novel PI.  We’re shooting for 250 words a day on ANYTHING, with 3 days of reprieve.  I had already thought about hosting a January Novel PI (and may still) in honor of the New Year and establishing (or re-establishing) good writing habits, but this is just what I need to ease back in.  Somehow December feels better for writing for me than November because finals wind up, grades are turned in, I get 2 weeks off…so…yeah.  Come join us!

4 thoughts on “Wanted: Kick In The Pants

  1. But is it FUN, Kait?? Perhaps your brain wanted some insight from the old projects.
    I promised you the folk tale of cheetahs – here it is (yes, I procrastinated, too!)
    African legend:
    A mother cheetah went off to hunt one day, leaving her 4 cubs hidden. But an evil man was watching her and saw where she had hidden the little ones. He stole the cubs while the mother was away. When she discovered her cubs were missing, she began to cry. She cried so hard that, to this day, all cheetahs have tear tracks on their faces.
    The story goes on – A kind man came along and asked why the mother cheetah was crying. She told him of her stolen cubs. The man was angry that someone would take the cheetah’s children and went off to search for them. He found them and returned them to their mother. She was so grateful that she promised that future generations of cheetahs would be loyal to humans.
    (this legend may have started as a way to explain why cheetahs are so easily tamed – for wild animals, that is.)

    1. If I only ever wrote things when/if they were fun, I’d never finish ANYTHING. 🙂 I just have to bull through the middle. That’s always the toughest for me. Thanks for the story!

  2. That’s great that you’ve fallen in love with old unfinished works – I’ve found that sometimes I’ve made really exciting progress when I’ve come back to novels like this. But I always ask myself if they really DO need revising or whether I’d be better starting something new !

    1. Well considering none of them are finished, I’d say that they need less revision and more just straight up completion.

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