Bit by the Writing Bug

When I wrote Camp Life (the YA novel I’m currently querying) I was super OCD about it. I wrote an average of 3-5 hours a day, not only when I was working on the first draft but also while revising. As a result, eight months after I wrote the opening sentence I completed the fifth draft. I like Camp Life. It was a fun story to write, and when I come back to it almost a year after I finished it, I still enjoy it.

But what about this past year? I haven’t written squat. I mean, yeah, I do have almost 45K towards the rough draft of The Giant in the Attic. But it’s still rough, and it isn’t even finished yet. And I’ve been working on it longer than it took me to finish writing and editing Camp Life.

In November I decided to start writing a new fiction project. The Giant in the Attic is memoir. I have lots of story ideas floating around in my head. So I figured if I just picked one and started writting the OCD behavior would return. But it didn’t work. I couldn’t get into the story I was trying to write, so it felt really flat and boring. Writing fiction was suddenly even more of a chore than writing memoir. So I gave up on that project and decided to just wait until a new project slapped me upside the head and forced me to write it.

Well, on December 2nd that happend. Things like NaNoWriMo don’t seem to work for me. When I want to write, nothing can stop me. So word count gimics really don’t add much modivation. And when I don’t want to write, I can’t get excited about gimics. But in the past five days I’ve written 13,000 words towards my next novel.

I’m not going to tell anyone what it’s about yet, because I’m totally pantsing this. I really don’t know what it is about. I have no idea where I am going with these characters. I’m only 50 pages into it, so I’m still meeting the characters. But I’m back to writing during every free second I can find. And I’m back to loving writing. Sometimes it’s good to be OCD. And even without any stupid gimics, I'll probably hit 50K well before months end - not because I have to, but because I need to.

Joke of the Day

A visitor to a certain college paused to admire the new Hemingway hall that had been build on campus. "It's a pleasure to see a building named for Ernest Hemingway," he said.

"Actually," said the guide, "it's named for Joshua Hemingway. No relation."

The visitor was astonished. "Was Joshua Hemingway a writer, also?"

"Yes, he wrote a check."