This has been a weird week for me in writing. My big high was finishing my revision on Tuesday, three days earlier than I had expected. It felt great to get to the end again. And I feel good about the work I did.
Getting to the end in a big revision feels just as good as writing The End after a first draft. This go around, I added new layers to my manuscript, swelling the story by another few thousand words and giving more muscle to the characters and action.
My low came after I’d finished the revision. I decided to put it away for a couple days to work on other non-novel-writing things before I’d do a speed run-through of all my changes to check word choice, spelling, grammer, etc, before I give the revision to my beta readers. I thought a few days off would be great, freeing, wonderful. I was going to get all these things done from my to do list.
Not quite. I got lots of other things done — not as much as I wanted, but a lot. But I felt terrible. Lackluster. No enthusiasm. I didn’t really know what to do with myself.
I think the lesson here is that next time I finish a revision, the next day I have to jump into another novel. I actually do have another novel that I’ve started, but I figured that with only a couple days off, what’s the point of jumping back to it? But I could have done a lot of thinking and sketching out ideas in that time.
It feels like I’m not complete without writing each day, novel-writing. That’s why I write.
What was your high and low this week?
Samantha Clark 