Resurrection

Tying back into my earlier heartrending story about learning to walk again after a motorcycle crash—with which I kicked off this batch of blog entries—I find myself in the completely unsurprising position of having to learn to write again. Not how to put words on the page, per se, but to get back into the routine of writing, and being effective about it. The last time I did this, at the very beginning of this blog, the key factors in forming that habit were as follows:

1. Clearing the way: Breaking the mental block against writing fiction that I’d built up over two decades of putting it off


2. Leaving [me] wanting more: making myself stop before I wanted to on each given day for the first couple of months, in order to make myself look forward to each session.
3. Nurturing the obsession: Once the routine was in place, I had to, on an ongoing basis, foster sense of urgency required to get a project of this magnitude moving and keep up the momentum while maintaining the highest standard of quality I could achieve.

Thus, after months adrift, in a different place, and in many ways a different person, I am now in the process of doing exactly the same things once again.

It will take some time to get the old engine fired up, but the lazy and shiftless aspect of me that insists upon making this difficult is fast running out of excuses.

In fairness to, uh, me, I guess, I haven’t gotten absolutely nothing done. Over the last few months, I’ve implemented hundreds of tedious small-to-mid-sized edits that the book’s alpha readers indicated were needed. I made notes pertaining to numerous key character and plot issues plus many new ideas that came to me over time in conversation, in the shower, in bed (including dreams), while driving, and in other random contexts. I’ve organized my long lists and stacks of notes pretty well, and even implemented some of the ideas contained within as changes in the book.

Perhaps most importantly of all, I’ve come up with what I feel is an interesting and fairly unique solution to the major dilemma I’ve known about for over a year, an issue similar to the “story question” in the (great) movie Stranger than Fiction.

So in summary, I won’t be restarting things from scratch here. It’s not a clusterfuck. It’s just work. A lot of work. With most of the easy fixes done. Meaning, most of what’s coming up is the hard stuff.

On a positive note, I’ve had conversations with various “alpha stage” readers corroborating the idea that the project is worth seeing to completion. In other words, most of them like it. In fact, the ones who like it, seem to like it rather a lot. Given that that’s how genre fiction operates, I couldn’t really ask for much more.

All right, that’s enough of an update for now. What it boils down to is this: over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be enmeshed in the process of flogging myself back up to speed.