A Week Well Wasted

I feel again like I've done a whole lot of nothing.

Only I haven't.

Ok, sure, I haven't done heaps, but this week I've got a lot more done than I have in recent months. I've been sick as a dog all week, yet I still managed to get my shit together for a shoot on Thursday (which came out real nice) and managed to get the ball rolling on Lifebringer again (which now stands at 50,000 words). It's not been a lot, but it's been progress.

It's really hard to remember in the harder times how much work I have done in the past. I can sit there feeling what what I've written is crap, but I have to remind  myself that a) it's only a draft and b) I'm still learning to write books. It's so easy to forget those things and get myself down. It's easy to make no progress and beat myself up over it. It's easy to fall into a slump and not have the patience or energy to get out of it.

I've been in a slump, and I'm hoping that this last week means I'm on my way out of it.

Thing is, for the longest time I was getting frustrated that I wasn't doing any work on Lifebringer, or any other of my projects for that matter. In truth, it's okay to not get anything done if I'm not able to get myself working. I could force myself to write 500 words, hate the process, hate the words and frustrate myself with having to edit them later. Or I could just wait. I could wait until I can write 2,000 words, and have them be better than if I'd forced them.

Now yes, this says some things about work ethic. But I'm not saying 'it's ok to slack off and not try', I'm just saying it's ok to stop if trying hard is yielding nothing. I'm not working to a deadline here. I'm not under any contracts. I've got other stuff in my life and I'm allowed to let my writing sit idle for a time if I so please. What I'm not allowed to do, at least if I want to be taking myself seriously, is stop trying. It's important to keep myself 'in practice', if you will. And that means sitting the fuck down and trying to get some work done from time to time. Or writing a short one-off piece just to keep my skills sharp

So that's what I've done this week. I've been legitimately slacking off, and I'm done getting down on myself about it. So now I'm making myself try and write, even if I end up deleting all the words after an hour. It's paid off this week in the form of another chapter of Lifebringer, and my hope is that before long it'll yield greater and greater returns.

And if it doesn't, then at least I can be satisfied that I'm trying. The alternative sucks.