It was a great week. If you follow my Facebook page you were privy to the final count down as I wrote the last pages of my Northern California book. I finished up the first draft on Wednesday night and celebrated with my guy over a dinner of take out burritos and champagne. Ahhhh, victory.
As I was toasting, an email arrived asking me to write a piece for Yes! Magazine. It’s just a few hundred word assignment, but it’s on a topic I’m passionate about (organic farmers battling Monsanto), and I was just really psyched to have and editor contact me about writing a (paid) piece.
Then Thursday night I met with my writing group. I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating – they’re awesome. There were two big take aways that night. One was the idea of Admin Mondays. One of my group members more or less devotes Mondays to taking care of crap that builds up (like scheduling appointments or following up on that credit card fraud thing, or blah blah blah). That way when those things come at you during your writing week you can just put them aside until Monday. Love it.
The other inspiration was a member of our group who is working on her first novel (as most of us are). Her new years resolution is to write every day, even if it’s just a little. Her book is really coming along, and talking with her just reminded me that it’s so important to keep moving on big projects. So Friday I pulled out my own novel and read it front to back. It’s at about 190 pages now, but I haven’t touched it since August.
Even though reading it was encouraging (it’s not half bad), I’m finding it so hard to get back into it writing it. Like so many times before I’m reminded how writing is like exercise and if you don’t do it for a long time, it’s really hard to get back to it. But it’s not like I haven’t been writing. I just haven’t been writing on that project.
It was an awesome week, and I’m way ahead of my new years goal of finishing the Nor Cal book by the end of January!
Now if I could just get back into the novel…
Leave a Reply