And Now Back To the Novel Previously in Progress…
Let me turn this blog away from the Great American Road Trip and Star Trek back to its original purpose – talking about my novel(s).
It’s now been a full two weeks since we returned from our trip and life has settled back into the usual rhythms of school and work. For at least the previous five months before the trip, I was working a great deal of overtime in my day job and had no time or energy for writing. I channeled my little time for writing on our trip to blogging the experience. But things have opened up now and I’ve had time to write…and found it hard to get anything out. I’m not sure what the resistance is, but I find myself trying to do anything else but sit down and write. Last week, I had two whole evenings free to write and all I got out of it was two paragraphs. My wife was away today and the weather was supposed to be crappy, so I tried to focus on writing. And I kept finding things to do to avoid it until I finally put my head down and just wrote. I managed to get nearly two pages written. I’m not sure what’s up with my sudden reluctance to write now that I actually have time to do it. It’s not writer’s block in the sense that I can’t think of anything to write – there’s just a reluctance to get going on it. I’ll keep working at it; hopefully I’ll get this resolved before my writing retreat.
Yes, I’m going on a home made writing retreat in less than two weeks. For Father’s Day, my lovely (and understanding) wife “gave” me a writing retreat. In two weeks, I’m going to a KOA camp that we visited last year. I have a cabin in the woods from Friday through Sunday and I’m going to write. I’m sure I’ll do a couple of other things, but the focus of that weekend is to write and kick some butt on this book. Perhaps I’m subconsciously waiting for the writing retreat to open the creative faucets. Personally, I’d like to get myself back on track so that I’m writing more freely when the retreat starts.
And speaking of writing, I have been listening to Julia Roy’s podcast How We Work Now, available here or on iTunes. In her podcasts, she interviews writers and editors mostly in the business or non fiction genre (but also includes a few fiction authors and even a poet). I’ve been listening to this on the way to work every day and it’s really got me thinking about my own writing in ways I never considered. Even in episodes that I think won’t pertain to me at all, I usually find some nugget of information. I went into the episode where she interviewed the poet (let’s cut a long story short and say that I don’t care for poetry much at all) thinking I would hate it and I think it’s my favorite episode to date! If you’re interested at all in writing, I highly recommend it!
And finally, I’m happy announce that I will be participating in the Indie Author Day Event at the Sherburne Public Library on October 8 from 11:00 AM – 3:00 PM. I’m still working on the details, but the event culminates in a 2:00 PM Webcast with writers, agents, and the industry leaders. I’ll send an update out once I have more details.
That’s all for now; I need to get back to writing….
Happy journeys!
Mike