Obviously, this constant litany of self-hatred wasn’t conducive to my creativity. I would go days without writing. At one point, it took me a month to finish a chapter. After I got over the mid-book slump, though, things started to pick up. By the time I sent the book off to be edited, I realized I’d been way, way too hard on myself. During the writing of these books, the following things were going on:<\/p>\n
- \n
- The school year started.<\/li>\n
- My daughter was in a play, requiring me to sit through nightly rehearsals.<\/li>\n
- I ended up working on props for that play.<\/li>\n
- The holidays happened.<\/li>\n
- I worked tech for another play.<\/li>\n
- My daughter was involved in another play, herself.<\/li>\n
- My mother-in-law died, leaving us to clean out her apartment and take care of her estate.<\/li>\n
- And the whole time, I’ve been homeschooling my son.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Now, granted, I didn’t have to do the theater stuff I did, but we know what happens when writers are all work and no play. There’s a whole horror novel about that. On top of all of those things, I neglected to remember that:<\/p>\n
- \n
- I wasn’t just writing one book. I was writing two at the same time.<\/li>\n
- I was working on this blog daily.<\/li>\n
- Both books turned out longer than I expected, by about 15,000 words.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
So, while I was freaking out about not working enough, not getting anything done, I was really writing about 15,000 words per week here and doing things for my mental health so that I could continue to function. On top of that, I was writing basically 160,000 words of fiction in eight months. That’s four months per book. I was doing\u00a0just fine<\/em>.<\/p>\n
If you’re writing and you’re frustrated by how little you feel you’re getting done or how long it’s taking you to finish, I want you to drop what you’re doing and take stock of your life and what’s going on. Are things at work stressful? Are you putting in a lot of extra hours or coming home mentally sapped? Are you reeling from the loss of a loved one or a major upheaval in your home? Did a pet die? Did you or someone else lose a job? Maybe you’ve taken up a new hobby and it’s taking up time you would have spent on writing (which is not necessarily a bad thing, if it’s keeping you on an even keel)?<\/p>\n
No matter what it is, stop being hateful to yourself. I love these books, but it’s always going to be tempered with a little bit of sadness that the writing of it was so brutally un-fun. I shouldn’t have done that to myself, and I’m going to try not to do that in the future. I hope you can join me in that. Let’s make a pact right now: we’re not going to be awful to ourselves for not being mindless writing machines with no other needs or desires in life.<\/p>\n
So, after all of that, do you want to see the cover of\u00a0Baby Makes Three<\/em>? Of course, you do!<\/p>\n
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