Well, this feels strange. For those of you who don’t know, I’ve been dealing with a lot of health issues this year, and as a result, I haven’t been writing, both creatively or on my blog. And although I don’t want to jinx myself, I’m finally on the mend and wanting to write again, so I thought I would share my experiences coming back to the keyboard with all of you.
As a person who uses their writing to cope with a lot of things, stepping away from my writing to focus on getting better was a strange experience, especially because I view my writing as a huge part of who I am. Truthfully, it felt like I lost a part of myself when I stopped writing, and I’m beyond happy that I actually feel like writing again. But I’ve noticed some small problems cropping up with returning to writing, problems that I didn’t really anticipate.
The biggest issue I’ve noticed is that I don’t really know what project I want to be working on. I constantly have so many projects in development that picking just one to focus on seems impossible, and even just picking a couple to work on still feels like a gargantuan task. I have such limited time and energy to focus on writing right now, so there’s a lot of pressure to pick a good selection of projects to work on. And in all honesty, I haven’t really decided, instead opting to just work on a bunch of them at once and see which ones stick. That’s probably not a great strategy, but I just can’t choose.
While avoiding picking a small number of projects to work on, I’ve been trying to pick up where I left off with my old projects, and that has also proved to be a challenge. I want to work on these manuscripts, but I haven’t touched them in months, to the point where I don’t even remember writing some of the scenes. As a result, I’m faced with the super fun task of having to go back and reread every chapter I’ve written, as well as going through the outlines to ensure that I actually know what’s going on in the novel. For some projects, this isn’t too daunting, since it’s only ten chapters, and the outline isn’t too terribly complicated. For one of my projects, however, I have seventeen chapters to reread, and an outline that fills fifty seven short chapters. It’s a lot of work, but it’ll be worth it. Right?
Being faced with the monstrous task of rereading a bunch of my own work--a writer’s worst nightmare--has led me to thinking about new projects. And can you blame me? I’ve been away from my keyboard for months; I was bound to come up with new ideas. But now I’m stuck trying to decide if I want to work on the new projects, and get really into plotting, or prove my loyalty to my old projects and finish them first, since I’ve sunk so much time into them. I wish I had an answer for what I’m going to do, but at the time of writing this, I’m actively working on four projects: two old ones that require a lot of rereading, one old one that requires some heavy reworking so I can write it, and one new one, since I like to give myself plenty of tasks to work on.
Although all of these projects are going to require a lot of work, I am genuinely thrilled to be writing again, and creating these fictional stories that bring me so much joy. Writing makes my soul happy, and being able to share that with all of you is something very powerful to me. I don’t have any big updates about when my next novel is coming out (as you can see, I’m quite indecisive on what I’m working on), but I wanted to let all of you know that I am writing again, and I’ll have updates on those projects soon--once I figure out which ones I’m prioritizing, of course.
That's all for now, folks!
-C
