Monogamy sucks. At least in terms of writing.
For the past year, I’ve devoted myself to writing one novel and nothing else. With the exception of a couple of anthology deadlines and rewrite requests, I’ve been pretty good about sticking to my guns. I’ve put down some good words, but I’ve also put down some bad ones. This is par for the course with any book, but the problem in my case is that I haven’t enjoyed writing hardly any of them.
Okay, that’s not entirely true. There have been some good times, but they’ve been greatly outweighed by the bad. My mistake was that if I wasn’t working on the novel, then I wasn’t working on anything. That was my one rule, the discipline that I thought would keep me from getting distracted with other projects. The idea being that if focused all of my time and energy on this one book, I would actually end up finishing it.
Unfortunately things didn’t work out that way.
The problem was when I wasn’t working on the novel I’d get frustrated that I wasn’t working on the novel, and then I’d get angry with myself for not working on the novel, which in turn led to my feeling guilty for not working on the novel. Sometimes I’d forced myself to work on it, which is not always a bad thing to do, sometimes it’s even necessary, but eventually I became so frustrated with the entire process that I began to loathe the book. I’m sure every writer feels this way about his/her work-in-progress to some degree, because it can’t be smooth sailing all the time, but I really, really hated this thing. It got to the point where I began to dread even opening the Word document on my computer. That’s when I knew it was time to stop and regroup.
The solution turned out be simple: I started working on another novel. Sounds crazy, I know. Shouldn’t a second novel only double my frustration, double my guilt? You’d think so, but as it turned out, I actually found it helped. Having another project to work on when the first one wasn’t coming along is just what I needed. The fact that this other novel is so different from the first probably also helps. Strangely enough, I have a feeling I’ll end up finishing the second book before the first one.
This isn’t the process I thought would ever work for me, and although I can’t shake the feeling that writing two novels at the same time is spreading myself thin, I have to go with what works for me right now. The important thing is that I’m back to writing on a regular basis, and I’m enjoying it. These days I only get angry when I don’t have time to write, and for me that’s business as usual.
Also, in case you didn’t notice, I’ve been playing with XML slideshows and put one on my homepage showcasing my various projects and publications. I hope you dig it.
