Breakthrough
At the risk of making this a trend—no seriously, do not expect these Tuesday posts to become a thing. My goal is a post on Monday to establish my goal and another Friday to check myself, not midweek—I had a breakthrough in the creative block last night. While doing a mindlessly repetitive task, I realized why I was getting stuck on the middle-grade spooky fun story. It was actually surprisingly simple: I was locked into the same 3 beats (protagonist at school, protagonist at lunch, protagonist at home, repeat). Now I have a clearer idea of the setting and other story beats that can pull him out of the rut. In fact, I managed to knock out twice what I was planning on doing to his story today.
That’s actually a decent segue for my writing progress overall. Recently, I realized I was asking way too much of myself, particularly now that school is back in session and my daily obligations have tripled as a result. And no, I’m not exaggerating when I say tripled. I’ve dialed back on myself and refocused by un-focusing. Confused? I don’t blame you.
Basically, I was working exclusively on two projects at a time: Ebon Maw plus a manuscript. The problem is that, with Ebon Maw in limbo, I haven’t really had any motivation to work on it, so when I locked up on the manuscript, I found myself stuck in a rut of non-starting and spinning in the plot. So, rather than continuing to fight with Ebon Maw (no lie, I got exactly 14 words written in it during its last session) and getting nowhere in the middle-grade, I’m stopping all work on Ebon Maw until I know what’s going on with it going forward, and dividing my daily minimum page count across multiple projects that are interesting me.
That means instead of trying to fight through 5 manuscript pages a day in a project that’s fighting back, I’ll spend 1 or 2 pages on it, and then spend the remaining pages on a couple other projects that are piquing my interest. Ergo, the time I was wasting doing nothing in the middle-grade spooky fun is getting better spent on the YA urban fantasy that wanted to be a paranormal romance, and another project that’s demanded all my attention for the past… I don’t even want to guess how many months.
Sounds like a lot. Sounds like too much. “You should focus on one project at a time!” I hear you screaming at me. Yeah, well, guess who hit their daily writing goal and ran over it in 2 hours today…
Will it slow down my overall progress? Sure! Absolutely! No questions asked! But is any progress better than no progress? I rest my case.
Right now, I have plans for releases in February, June, September, and October of 2027. I can’t keep stressing about a missed deadline for 2026 while letting those ones fall to the wayside. And I especially can’t keep wasting creative energy on a project that might very well need to be ported over here chapter-by-chapter over the course of months. That’s just completely illogical!
So here’s to slow progress over none at all!
