Head down, fingers on keyboard

I have to confess, the last week or so I’ve sort of been coasting on my writing goals. Where a few weeks ago I was churning out 2-4k a day, the last week has seen at best 1k a day.

Shaking self off

OK, back to work for me. As I write this, its a dreary Saturday, still early in the afternoon. I’ve got music queued up (Lord of the Rings Soundtracks – all three – for over an hour and a half (I think longer) of orchestral drowning.

Yeah, all set.

Just need to. You know. Write.

<Dramatic pause while I set up Spongebob on the TV for the girls. I think it important to note this as it represents a break in my train of thought.>

Yeah. Muse is still missing.

And this, folks, is how most wannabe writers fail. We all know how to write when the scene at hand is full of action and vigor, when the characters are practically leaping from our unborn conscience, dancing as our fingers fly across the keyboard, choreographing their initial, daring scenes. We know how to write when we see the scene around us, the dark Lords of the Sif summoning their grimgor and trollogs to cleanse the world of Man and the accursed Gredel. Roads? We don’t need the Road to Te’el’lan. We pave the road of our destiny in the bodies and souls of those that would stand in our w ay.

Which is why, when the Muse abandons us for an afternoon to get her nails done, or to take care of the six million errands she can’t do while babysitting us, we flounder so badly. We stab at the keyboard, halting sentences that feel almost as bad as they read. We curse the Muse, cast her image from our minds, and forget what she looks like.

“We’ll show her!” we scream, meaty paws held to the heavens of the Lost Road.

Then we turn our back on our writing for another turn of the Seasons, because it was all silly anyway. Never mind that it gave us relief from the tedium of real life, never mind that in an economy of staggering prices and tighter belts (which, I must say, is ironic given our propensity to obesity, yours truly sitting as a fine example) writing gives us a creative release that doesn’t have to cost anything. Never mind the investment of mind and body we put into these stories, or the fictional lives we strung together and breathed the artist’s breath of life into, only to dash it all on the shores of pointless despair.

This is how we fail. Because we haven’t been told that you need to write through these times just like you write through the others. Yes, your output will be lower, possibly even a little wooden and stilted.

That’s OK.

This isn’t your final draft. This isn’t your only chance for eternity to put words in this scene or chapter or section. But if you don’t put anything down, you won’t know where you could have done better next time because you won’t have anything to compare it to.

So I’m back where I started. 51.5k words so far. Sure would be nice to see that at 55K before the end of the weekend, but I need to take this one day at a time. And I already know next week my writing will suffer by the simple fact that I won’t be able to write on my commute Monday.

So I should go now. Happy hacking, kids.