After making incredible progress on my book for much of the summer, I stalled out and broke my own 100-word a day rule.
For weeks.
Granted, I had some excuses. My sister and her nephews and my brother and his wife arrived on the ranch and …
… we had bears.
Bears wandering around by the house during the day, bears in our trash at night, and smashing through our outdoor kitchen as if it were their own personal restaurant.
(As my sister said, an outdoor kitchen is serious hubris in the mountains of northwest Colorado. To be fair, we’ve lived on our ranch since the early ‘80s and had only once before seen a bear wandering down at the house, and that was during COVID, when all bets were off for all of us, humans and otherwise!)
Regardless, the bears kept us busy fortifying ourselves against their escalating behaviors. We were buying plywood, painting plywood, buying ratchet straps, buying more ratchet straps, trying to show people how to properly use the ratchet straps.
I got so distracted by all that activity, I stopped writing on my manuscript.
Every day in my morning pages I would remind myself that I was running out of time to hit my personal deadline for finishing this draft of my book, and everyday I would let myself off the hook.
Plus I was busy trying to work through the finishing touches on my amazing new website. Isn’t it awesome?
Ironically, one of those things I was firming up was my new freebie, The Writer Blaahs Reset. (You can grab it below this post.)
And then it occurred to me:
I wasn’t writing not because I had a million other things on my plate — I wasn’t writing because I had this big extended scene to write and I was too nervous about it to just sit down and get it done.
YEP. DEAR READER, I HAD THE WRITER BLAAHS.
So I took my own advice and went back to the basics, my trusty Master Notebook and a good pen. I brought them to my cut and color appointment this week and wrote the first couple hundred shitty words I needed to write to crack the big scene I’d been avoiding — and then after dinner I turned that work into 1300 words, finished the scene, and launched myself into the next one.
Note to self — and you:
Always go back to the basics. A pen and paper will fix you up, every time.
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