Xandra Gregory

Today I wrote a thousand words.

That I have to trash. Somehow, they turned into the Flashback From Hell, that my heroine can’t even have because she’s lost her memory. They were supposed to be a dream, but people don’t dream in coherency, and it aggravates me to read books where people dream so coherently you can’t tell it’s not an actual scene.

But today’s momentousness (the spawn starting school again, the second’s naptime coinciding with first’s school time, and over an hour’s worth of quiet, focused writing time) produced a flashback.

A friggin’ flashback!

Maybe I shouldn’t be too hard on myself. I mean, it hasn’t even been a week that I’ve had these little hour-long chunks of time in the middle of the day to write. Maybe I have to get back into it, and stop feeling all giddy and weird about having an hour to think grownup thoughts.

Or maybe I should take my own advice. I have these periods where I think, “ZOMG, everything I write is crap!” Usually, I’m wrong–only 95% of it turns out to be crap, but the rest can be salvaged to serve as kickass inspiration for revisions. NaNoWriMo in November’s biggest message is to “turn off your internal editor” and I thought, after numerous BIAWs and several NaNos that I’d finally figured out how to do that. But writing is a process, and it’s easy to slip back into editing habits I thought I’d busted.

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This entry was posted by Xandra on Thursday, September 7th, 2006 at 9:40 pm and is filed under An Author's Life, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.