imagineblog

I’ve been ready to start for a week now. The outline is as complete as it needs to be, filling out any more detail will freeze the story. I have all my tools in order, I’ve given up on fiddling with mobile tech, I really have nothing to do with my time away from the office but read, write and sleep. (Seriously. My TV has atrophied down to a wristwatch, and there are pictures of my LOTRO character on milk cartons all over Middle Earth.) I’m ready, nothing ahead of me but the open road.

 

I am, therefore, spending a lot of time petting my cats.

 

Don’t get me wrong, my cats are great. But this blog isn’t about my cats. Nor are my cats going to write my gorram book, no matter how much they purr. That probably wouldn’t make much of a book, anyway. “Chapter 2, rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr”

 

So it’s up to me. I have to write it. I’m excited to get into it. I’m enthused, really. I’m also scared out of my mind.

 

I’m not sure why, really. I’m far better prepared to write Daniel Cho’s story than I was eleven years ago. I know the story, I know the characters, and I’m a much more mature and seasoned writer than I was. I should be able to knock this out of the park (without steroids!).

 

And maybe that’s the problem. Preparation is all fine and good, but now that I’m down to the moment of composition, the pressure is squishing me like a little bug. I’m so damn well prepared for this that I’m expecting myself to be perfect, to just start spilling out golden, finished prose. Very much not the freedom of writing Anne Lamott’s “shitty first drafts.”

 

I need to get over myself, sit down and start writing. I need to forget my preparation, forget what I know of the plot and the characters (forget these things in my concsious mind so that my subconscious is free to use them), and just write. I can spend weeks, months, years waffling and fussing about things like when I write, where I write, what input method I use (Letter Recognizer, Transcriber, thumb keyboard, onscreen keyboard, Stowaway keyboard, big comfy Microsoft Natural 4000 ergo board on my desktop), whether to start each writing session with writing practice or just dive right in, etc. But that’s not writing. It feels like writing because it’s peripherally related, but it’s not writing.

 

Writing is writing. Time to get to it.