I haven’t written a word of fiction for more than three months.
Real life has been very busy, with work going into overdrive at my office and having to move.
Of course I’m sure it didn’t help that I launched an exciting and time-consuming new website only a few weeks ago, as soon as work resumed its normal level of business.
Needless to say, I’ve already fallen off the Get Your Words Out wagon. I tell myself that it’s because I don’t use LJ much at all anymore that I’ve missed reporting my wordcount so many months in a row, but in truth I’m sure that if I’d had anything positive to report, I would have been all over my journal posting about it.
I remember how excited I was last month to start writing again, and how much I relished the opportunity to dedicate a full afternoon to The Paradise Swarm. The afternoon came and I sat in front of my open Scrivener document for a good 30 minutes, typing and deleting sentence fragments over and over again. I eventually had to pick up a book of prompts and exercises and work on that for an hour or so to warm up my writing muscles, before I was able to produce a miserly and pretty useless few hundred words. Cue disappointment, lack of self-belief, and all that jazz.
I know this is all very ‘woe is me’ but I only mean to underline how much more daunting the prospect of writing regularly becomes when one doesn’t do it, or has never successfully done it. I love my story, and I want to make progress on it. However slowly I was writing last year, I want to regain at least that.
So, I’m going to keep trying, and keep looking for strategies to motivate myself, and keep the writing ball rolling once I’ve actually started again. Does anyone have tips or strategies to keep the mojo going when life or work gets in the way?