Over the last few days, I’ve felt a little nervous. Sometimes I get this way, when I have this lingering feeling that something is about to happen, something is about to break free.
This nervousness certainly manifests itself in several ways, for me: irritability, shortness, lack of concentration, and feelings of ambivalence. (And that’s even when I think the “big break” is going to be something positive…)
<img class="size-full wp-image lazyload" id="i-1406" alt="Image" src="https://ericswyatt.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/nervous1.jpg?w=310" width="310" height="233" /> How in the world can I ever expect others to understand this novel if the one person in the world who should be able to decode it (ME!) finds it confounding?
Yesterday I sat down to work on my novel-in-progress. I’ve been chipping away at this thing lately, moving into the next phase, the final phase of the first fully-realized draft. The scene I needed to write was a flashback scene, and in order to do it justice (as well as ensure it had all of the right information in it) I had to go back to an earlier scene and find some very specific things I had written. Years ago. Literally.
In that process of digging around and trying to remember what I’d already revealed in the earlier bits and trying to pin down all that I wanted to reveal in the scene that needed to be written yesterday, I found myself bogged down in the pure insanity that this novel is.
I was, to put it mildly, quite discouraged. So much so, that I wasted away the one day this week I actually had a full day to work on the book. So much so, that I contemplated drop-kicking the whole thing into Tampa Bay and starting some new endeavor, like “Fast Food Technician” or “Domestic Cleanliness Aficionado.” Surely, God, if I’m supposed to be a writer, I wouldn’t be writing books that confuse the only person who might reasonably have a chance of figuring this mess out: ME!
It was evening, it was morning: a new day dawned. I took a deep breath, remembered how some of my favorite writer friends—those writer friends whose words make me swoon—have been discouraged lately, too.
No drop kicks. No giving up. A day away, and maybe a weekend of hammering away at organizational issues, but no giving up.
I’m on the edge of something much bigger than the little pieces that have been floating around, and that puts my personality on edge. “Hold on,” I tell myself. “Hold on for a wild ride.”
* * *
photo credit: Rennett Stowe via photopin cc