sheepish

umm...well, it's been over a month since i posted here. i was rather hoping that it had been less than a month. a month is a nice round, arbitrary number. less than = no guilt. more than = guilt. so, here i am, posting and feeling guilty and sheepish.

i don't know why i didn't post for so long. it's been an eventful time. i won a week in that contest, ironically the week after i posted about it. i'll find out this weekend if i'm in the top three or not. also, the furry one and i got engaged. no big surprise there, but it's nice. and so's my ring ;) i printed out a draft of my novel so far -- 160 pages, 70,000 words. i figure i've got about another hundred pages to go, which is ten weeks if i work at a chapter per week pace.

the book has been giving me some trouble lately. why is it that i only post about the trouble? i don't post about all the times that i get a warm fuzzy from writing, the times when i have the writer's equivalent of a brain orgasm because what i'm writing feels that damn good to me, the times i send off my chapter to margarita with satisfaction and pride.

nope, you don't get to hear about that. you get to hear about the tough times, the struggles, the blocks. right now, i'm in a block PERIOD. earlier in the fall, i was writing a chapter a week. since the beginning of november, i think it's been a chapter every two weeks. traumatizing. part of the problem is that i'm paralyzed by the thought of the agent search process. i'm already thinking about query letters and editing and hooks even though i've not finished a draft. luckily, margarita has helped exorcise that demon from my mind, and i'm not thinking about it. as much. i'm still thinking a lot about editing, but that's because i've changed a basic premise of the book, so i'm going to need to do some editing when the first draft is done. i KNOW KNOW KNOW i have to wait until it's done because if i wait to finish it until i've edited everything i need to edit, i won't ever get it done. i'm also having insecurity problems, doubting the readability of both my writing and my story. i'm worried that my main characters won't hold a reader's interest the way they hold mine. the only thing that's keeping me together is a line i read in stephen king's book "on writing." to paraphrase: the first draft of a novel is you telling the story to yourself. the second draft of a novel is you telling the story to someone else. i'm living for the second draft, and i think that's bad, because i'm only 2/3 of the way through on the damn book. i'm not giving it all of my attention, and i think it's coming through in both the length of time it's taking me to write and the product i'm writing.

i think to some extent writing is like losing weight. not that i've been too successful at maintaining the latter, but i've probably lost over 150 pounds if you add all my diets together over the years, so i know what it takes to be successful at taking it off if not keeping it off. anyway, you can think and you can plan and you can make charts and journals and all that shit. in the end, the only thing that matters is getting off your ass and DOING it. preparing healthy food. going to the gym when all you want to do is sleep. sitting in front of the computer and typing even when you're drenched with apprehension and worry. get. it. done. or, as my southern friends might say... git 'er dunn!