All last week, I tried to get back into the swing of writing daily aiming for a word count of 500-1000 words. It didn’t work. I did, however, open the document most days and I am going to count that as a win. It was a combination of lots of things, including some end of the summer blues, but I’m going to get back to using this blog as a motivation tool, with the occasional longer post about writing and editing, including much more of a series on self-editing. For today, though–it’s just the think-through-my-fingers motivational tool. I’m writing Ghosts of Belize and I’m stuck, back in the first scene, never quite managing to move forward.

When I reread everything I’d written last winter, I decided that a lot of it was better than I thought. The revisions I made in May were not improvements. So I’ve sort of merged those files, but I’m still tweaking those merges and that is ALL I got done last week. And I shouldn’t say done–that’s all I did, but I didn’t finish. I need to just let my fingers go on it, but it seems as if every time I start that, I wind up three sentences in, thinking that it’s pointless and stupid. I need to remember that it’s a first draft and maybe I just need to write a lot of stupid, pointless words in order to find out what the story is. So yes, today’s goal is 1000 words, but I give myself permission to hate them, permission to know that they’re all going to get cut once I unearth the real story that’s going to be buried in a lot of babble. But they’re the dirt I’m just going to have to lift in order to find the incredible fossil that’s hidden somewhere deep within them. Hmm, that would be a better metaphor if it was buried treasure. But I like dinosaurs and I bet Akira does, too. So today’s goal. Write 1000 words, give myself permission to let them be bad. I may try using 20/10s (write for 20 minutes, do something else) to pull the words out.