It's a real kick to finish your book.
Be it Draft 1 or 20, it's a totally natural high to feel FREE of the pressure or volition to keep hacking away at this monster you've created - at least for a while.
The days that lie post-finishing and pre-stressing-about-how-it-is-received are pretty terrific. Personally, I find myself able to shop, cook nicer things for dinner, spend idle minutes decluttering paperwork, all sorts of amazingly relaxing fun things. I finished Draft 4 last...
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Does it help a writer to put oneself on a deadline?
A few posts back I mentioned aiming to finish Draft Four by the end of September. I meant 2010, not 2011. But have I? Nope.
Does setting a deadline help me or hinder? Well, this has been a source of fruitful dialogue (read: arguments) between moi and Hubby. He's a planner. Micro-planner, macro-planner, he'll do all and any planning. It's part of his job, but also a big part of...
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Beware of small people's powers to derail your thoughts.
I'm in a real slump. Imagine trying to juggle a bowl of spaghetti (what I call rewriting a new draft of your novel) with the above image running out of her room every 5 minutes to go pee, or banish a basket from her space, or ask 'what time it is?', or proclaim with joy that she's had a 'short sleep' when she hasn't at all.
Days with...
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This is pretty wild:
http://www.thenovellive.org/about.php
Maybe some of us Paris writers can organise ourselves to do something similar...
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Tiramisu is an Italian dessert that roughly translates to 'pick-me-up' because it's made of espresso among other perky ingredients. This post is not about tiramisu per se, but more about how to Pick-Yourself-Up as a writer when you are facing the blues, or the reds, or the wall, or a mental BLOCK. Try some or all of the below to get yourself feeling perky again about your pages.
Let me know which tactics...
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I thought I'd write a beautiful first post but I've ended up procrastinating so much that I now think it's best to just talk about my fourth draft doldrums. I had all sorts of plans. I always do. First draft was going to look like a tenth draft, but it looked like a first draft. Second draft was so radically different it looked like a first draft, too. Third draft was the result of an intense four-day blitz while...
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