emotional wallowing as a way to avoid writing is emotional

Confession.  I finished the first draft of Lucidity Effect mid November and then spent TWO MONTHS fucking off.  I mean, I was opening the file and fiddling around, supposedly doing a second draft—but, honestly, I was spinning my wheels, twiddling with sentences, feeling depressed.  Sentences are not what a second draft is about, by the way.  Sentences comes much, much later.  I know this.  But I forgot.  Or something.  Anyway, it wasn’t until mid-January that I faced facts:  I needed to do a real revision.  As in, STOP WASTING TIME, LASSITER.  Buckle down and do the work!

I’m so annoyed with myself for throwing away two whole months on fiddly twiddly depression.  I week or two, fine, but two months!??

Anyway, I am doing a real revision now.  A guts and blood sort of revision, the kind where you rip things out, smoosh characters together, toss the losers and the boring bits, move scenes around, insert surgical metaphor here.  I actually feel a great deal of relief.  For those two months I could barely show up to the computer, wasn’t getting up early, had no motivation, pondered giving up writing, the usual, all the stuff I had managed to avoid during the drafting that went so smoothly this time.

Maybe I had to do all that emotional shit at once?  I didn’t avoid it, just postponed it?  Where was I that I didn’t notice that I was wheel-spinning?  Had my head up my bum, that’s what.

But listen, now that I’m working again, really working, my motivation is back!  It’s easy to get up early and write again.  I’m hot to do the next thing.  Thank god.

So I spent the last part of January going through the ms and working out The Plan.  Then I finally got started working with the actual book again last week.  Scene one got tossed, scene two got re-written, scene three had held up through pretty well, only a few tweaks, scene four got some new scaffolding, which brings me today to scene five which requires a total and complete overhaul.  Scary, but fun.

The point of the post is in this paragraph:  It is SO GOOD to be working again, and even though I am deeply uncertain about whether this book is going to survive the current tsunami, here’s the thing: I get depressed when I don’t write and then I think I’m too depressed to write, when really, if I just start working again, I’ll feel better.

I can’t tell you how many times I have forgotten that.  It’s embarrassing, really.  I can’t believe I forgot it AGAIN.

There are thirty scenes in Lucidity, I think, at last count.  That puts this draft at a couple of months.  I think I’ll aim for March 21.  GAH I was supposed to be at that point NOW, but I fucked off for two months. Did I mention that I am really pissed about that?

Oh well.  Every novel is different, and, apparently, this is the the path Liv Hannity (main character of Lucidity) is going to take to her birth.