Slowly, ever so slowly, the glacier that is my writing soul is melting. Unlike the polar ice caps, which comparatively, appear to be receding at light speed. It’s taken me literally months to lure the Muse back from Bermuda (that’s where She goes when She’s made at me – who can blame Her?) But I’m finally, regularly, getting words on paper again. At least 500 words a day during the work week. It feels reasonably good. But this particular story is still a slog at the moment. I want to be done with this novel. I want to move on to other projects. I have a whole crowd of them milling around like a bunch of needy undergrads with papers due clamoring outside my office door a la Raiders of the Lost Ark. But unfortunately, there is no back window for me to escape through. I must sit here and finish this dang thing.

I’m getting closer. I think. It took months, but I figured out where I went wrong. I went back, I rewrote what needed to be recreated, I figured out that the ending I thought was the ending was really the beginning of Book 2. And last night I think I figured out that the last three scenes I wrote need to be ripped out (again) to make way for what I’m calling “The Final Solution”. And no, I won’t be getting all genocidal on anyone. So now I have the ending in sight, I just have to get my group of adventurers from point A to point B, while making life increasingly difficult for them as we ramp up to the final confrontation. Not sure what that’s going to look like yet and before I write another word, I need to have that fixed in my mind. That’s what I’ll be doing at lunch today, figuring that bit out.

The best news is that I do have a whole ream of notes on revision. All this rework has shown me a lot about what I want my themes, where my character arcs are really going, and all the bits that I should have added but didn’t know that I needed to when I was doing the initial draft. So it’s all good. It’s all part of the process.

And thanks to my great virtual writing group (a shout out to YOU, Word Warriors!) I’ve also gotten unblocked on a fantasy novel that I started a couple of years ago, and have a new idea for a paranormal thriller.

So get ready for the sea levels to rise, dear readers. The ice is melting now. Soon Saskatchewan will be beach front property (note to self: buy property in Saskatoon). And I’ll have my first book published and available on Amazon before the Great Lakes become the Great Inland Sea.

Say… maybe this Global Warming thing isn’t so bad after all…

Finally. I finished the scene in the seedy hotel room. I had to use a Muse bomb. Not Holly Lisle’s definition of a Muse bomb… hers is more literary and potentially more useful. No, my Muse bomb is where I can’t figure out how to get the people out of the dang scene and moved on to the next bit, so I literally throw a bomb at the characters. This time it was my nefarious antag’s son’s henchmen throwing it. And actually, it worked out really well. The main protag and another character are now forced into an alliance, the bad guys have the complete upper hand, now having their real kidnap target in their possession, and the stakes have gone from being high to astronomical.

Not bad for only 500 words.

That was all it took to finish the dang scene. And it only took me a month. Sheesh! That’s, what… like 16 words a day. It will be 2012 before I get to type THE END at this rate. Just in time for the world to end. Somehow that’s fitting…

And sadly, even though I’ve finished the scene and have the big rescue all set up to write, the momentum is still not there. I can’t seem to get my head back in the game. I feel like Corwin of Amber, navigating the final arc of the Pattern. Every footstep takes a lifetime, every inch forward a herculean effort. And I don’t think it has anything to do with the story. I’m still convinced it’s fear — with a healthy dose of laziness thrown in. I can blame it on the dicey situation at work, but I’ve been living with the threat of them shuttering the business for a year now. I can blame it on the distraction of the whole car drama. I can even blame it on the Girl Scouts. It’s cookie sale time and I’m a Troop Leader for my daughter’s Brownie Troop. So between soliciting cookies sales at work, collecting cookie money and distributing cookies, I feel like I’m working a second job. Then, there’s the whole exercise and eat right thing. I’m trying really hard to eat right and exercise everyday (cause only the Gods know if I’ll have health insurance in a couple of months). So I’m cutting up fruit and vegetables and packaging them for lunch, putting together healthful casseroles the night before, so dinner is prepped and ready to be made the next evening, or loading up the crock pot so I can switch it on in the morning before I leave the house. And working out on the dreadmill or the cucumber bike (that’s my daughter’s name for the recumbent bike) every evening for 30-45 minutes. So that takes a huge chunk out of the three hours I have in the evening. Not to mention dishes, laundry, doing homework with my daughter, and every other little damn thing.

So. Lot’s of distractions and excuses. And after all my obligations are done, I plop down in front of the TV because, I deserve some relaxation time, right? I mean, I work my butt off, surely I deserve to watch an episode of Royal Pains or NCIS, right? Or maybe read a book for an hour, right? Right?

Yeah, I can hear you out there, jeering, booing. Jabbing your righteous sticks through the bars of my self-imposed cage. “Sheesh,” you say. “It would only take you 20 minutes to cobble together 500 words. Surely you can find 20 minutes a day.”

Or maybe, “You just don’t want this bad enough. If you did, you’d stay dedicated to it. That’s what real successful writers do.”

In my writing courses, I always tell students that it’s about creating habits. That if you write everyday, you’re more likely to be able to write every day. You train the brain by repetition. So why am I having so much trouble taking my own advice? What pay off am I experiencing that keeps me from working towards the goal that has driven me since I was four years old and able to put words on paper?

Or are you people right? Am I just too lazy? Do I just not have what it takes, because I lack both the dedication and the discipline?

Ooooh. Now you’ve done it. You’ve gone and thrown down the gauntlet. Nobody tells me I can’t do something. Nobody tells me I’m not good enough (except of course, for myself).
So you challenge me to write 500 words a day, do you? And you’re really sure I can’t do it, aren’t you? Because of my track record to date.

Well… I’ll show you! PHHHBBBTTTTTT!!!!!

Okay. Off to write 500 words. (mutter mutter grumble grumble can’t tell me what I can and cannot do I’ll show them no faith am not lazy mutter mutter) Oh and just so I can have the last word, your mother is a hamster and your father smells of elderberries! Haha!

So I lost my Jetta this week. No, I didn’t misplace her in a night of drunken debauchery — although that probably would have been preferable. No, she was a victim of vehicular homicide. It was icy on Monday morning. Black ice. I wasn’t even out of my subdivision, on my way to work, when a woman in a Honda, coming home from work, lost control of her car and slammed into me. It was the longest 4 seconds in my life, watching her coming straight at me and me completely unable to do a thing about it. I swerved to the right, and as she rammed me, shoved my car up onto the curb and into a fire hydrant. Her car smashed the left side of my car in the front and the fire hydrant did the same to the right. Broke the axle and everything. Given the fact that my car was 11 years old and had over 170k miles on it, the insurance company, despite my pleas, determined it was not worth fixing. Yeah, right. They don’t have to make my car payments. As soon as I apply for a copy of my title (it’s been 7 years, I have no idea where said document is), they’ll give me $2500 for my poor baby. Granted, for my car, that’s generous. But it doesn’t go very far towards a new one.

It took me a good four hours just to stop shaking from the adrenline surge and the shock. Banged my head on the side window, somehow scraped and bruised my knee, wrenched my shoulder from the seatbelt and twisted my ankle. And I was only going 5 miles an hour!! My glasses flew off my face, broke against the dash. It took me ten minutes to figure out why I couldn’t see anything.

So… I’m a writer. Surely there’s grist for the mill here. As I think about my current protag, as she’s running from the baddies, taking fire, getting blown up, I’d like to think her reflexes, her courage, her ability to function on an overload of adrenaline would be far superior to mine. Because I now know for a fact, that faced with oncoming destruction, my brain fogs up, my senses dull, and I become and addle-pated, babbling idiot. I’m sure the EMT guys who checked me out once they’d pried me out of my vehicle would concur whole-heartedly with that assessment.

Still, some of that shaky, hyper-speed, revved up behavior should be evident in even the most phlegmatic and battle-hardened action heroes. So let this post be my reminder that when I go back to revise, I need to pepper in some of that, to give the thing verisimilitude. Gods know this experience has to be good for something, right?

Of course the bad news (other than the premature demise of my sainted Jetta, no matter that the air conditioning didn’t work, the cup holder was broken and the glove box wouldn’t stay closed) is that since Monday, my whole life has revolved around trying to figure out how I was going to pay for a new vehicle and then finding said new (cheap and crappy) vehicle. What a freaking nightmare. All of which has completely derailed my writing.

However, much like my heroine, Maggie, I may falter, but I always get back up. Kind of like a Weeble. So okay. I lost three days. It’s now Thursday and it’s time to get back in the saddle. I have a new car, which I am NOT in love with (but don’t tell her that, she can’t help being inferior to my beloved Jetta), and have almost figured out how I’m going to make the car payments. It’s going to be a complicated process, involving taking what little savings I had in investments, cashing all that out, putting it all against the car loan, then having to refinance my loan for the new smaller amount to make the payments smaller. Did I say what a freaking nightmare this all is?

And tonight, after I finish doing homework with the small fry, I’m going to sit down and start committing words to paper again. Or pixels to monitor. Or whatever. I have a new added incentive. I need to sell this book (or many many copies of it, to be precise) in order to afford my astronomical car payment for my cheap, crappy car that will be a rust bucket before I even have it paid off.

Nothing like desperation to light a fire under one’s keister. Do you suppose this is what the Muse had in mind when she took over that Honda woman’s body and smashed my car into smithereens?

Knowing my Muse… you’d be a fool to bet against it.

Well, okay, only metaphorically. Apparently, much like Amelia Earhart, my metaphorical writing plane has crashed in the inhospitable vastness of the Horrific Ocean, and I am surrounded by sharks. There’s the dreaded Mak-upyourmindandwritethedamnedscene-o shark, the Great White Hope, the Hammer(another nail in your career coffin)Head, and the dreaded Bull (sh*t, that’s what this scene is) shark. All of whom now surround me. Fear is a great thing, when you’re actually swimming in the non-metaphorical ocean, with real sharks. It keeps you alive. But here in the wine dark sea of my inner landscape, these fears keep me from moving forward. I am frozen at the keyboard. And the damned sharks are going to eat me alive.

I’ve been stuck on the same scene for weeks. I even know how it’s supposed to end. And it does what I want it to, moves the story forward to where I want it to go. Where, dare I say it, IT even wants it to go. And yet, I can only squeeze out a handful of words every four or five days. I’m bleeding my story out slowly, drop by drop. And the sharks are circling, drawn by the smell of story blood and the thrashing of my inner self as I inch closer to The End.

Is that what this fear is? A fear of finishing? A fear of what comes after finishing? A fear that it’s been six months of torture for a mess of monumental proportions? Or am I heading in the wrong direction with the story entirely, and this is the Muse’s way of telling me I’ve lost my way? Refusing to work until I suss out the correct heading? I feel like I think Amelia must have felt, trying desperately to contact Howland Island on her radio, getting nothing but static, looking below where she thought her destination ought to be, yet seeing nothing out the window but blue-green waters iced with whitecaps horizon to horizon, with no land in sight. Which way, O Muse? Left? Right? Up, down? Kittywumpuss? Through some dimensional portal I can’t quite make out?

I only know that if I let the sharks eat me this time, there won’t be a sequel. No soap opera death here, where unbeknownst to the viewing audience, I magically reappear after a several month hiatus (in which I was appearing in a show off-off-broadway), having, MacGyver-like, carved my way out of the shark from the inside with a knife fashioned from something I found in its stomach, just in time for a dark-haired, blue-eyed, muscular Irish hunk to come along in his Uncle’s fishing boat, haul me aboard and row me to safety. This is one of those make or break moments.

And the only weapons I have at my disposal are this pretty green and white flash drive, and a pumkin spice latte. Wonder what MacGyver would have done with those?

So writing is a balancing act.  Much like Icarus, I need to fly high… but not so high the sun melts the wax holding my wings together.  Lately… okay, more than lately, I’ve barely managed to get above the treeline.  Taller trees tend to knock me flat.  And trust me, getting airborne again either involves a lot of running or jumping off cliffs.  I’m not fond of either.

So how do I manage it?  Keeping aloft, and yet not getting to close to the sun?

That’s what I intend to explore in this blog.  I’m currently flying low.  What the flyboys call coming in under the radar.  I need some lift, and my flaps seem to be stuck.  Or my engine’s stalling.  Or maybe I’m just out of gas.  And you know how dicey mid-air re-fuelings can be.

I’m longing to gain some altitude.  I’ve actually forgotten what it felt like being up there, way high, the heat of that golden orb burning my skin.  But somehow, I’ve got to get there again.  And at the moment, the only thing I can think to do is to flap harder.  I’ll let you know how that works out!