Getting Into Work Again

When I wasn't getting all choked up today about the Terabithia story in the Burlington Free Press, I managed to finished the next draft of the second A Girl, a Boy book. I need to go over it carefully, come up with some chapter titles, and probably read it out loud, since it's short enough to do that. I hope to be able to mail it out on Wednesday.

The revision will only have taken about two and a half weeks once I finally got started, but it was horrible getting back to work after spending a month reading for Cybils in December and then having holidays and family around for a big chunk of January. I can barely write if there's someone home on the street, so you can imagine what it's like when there are people in the house.

I could tell that I was finally getting into a writing mode when I started remembering to freewrite whenever I got stuck. I know I talk about freewriting a lot, but what often happens is that I forget to do it. I get stuck and just drift off to check my e-mail or see what's going on on the news sites. I'm feeling incredibly close to Anna Nicole Smith right now. I spent a lot of time reading about her the end of last week.

I felt I was making real progress toward the end of this revision, not just with the revision, itself, but in learning how to write with better use of freewriting.

Now what I'm hoping to do is try to start a schedule for my weeks--a few hours reading professional material, a few hours working on essays, a few hours working on projects A, B, C.

Yeah, I know that will never work. But what I'm hoping will happen is that spending a few weeks doing that will get me involved enough in one of those projects to start running with it.

Yeah, I know that will never work, either. But there's a reason so many of my family members hate me for my optimism.