Current mood:	hopeful
Entry tags:	writing, writing coach

Original fiction project - week of 6/28/2009
Back from vacation this week. I flew back Monday and collapsed, so that was still technically a vacation day. Tuesday, I just took it easy, getting back into my morning exercise routine but not morning pages. I did do three days of morning pages starting on Wednesday. I thought it was going to be more difficult than it ended up being. When I sat down on Tuesday and pulled up my neglected writing projects, the new story seemed very far away. I hadn't morning-paged since the 19th. I wasn't sure I was going to be able to jump in cold first thing in the morning when my brain was still fuzzy. But I guess that's the beauty of free writing, you can kind of ramble a bit until your brain does connect to what you're writing and something starts to flow.

I think, though, that some of my resistance to the morning pages was a growing desire for more structure in my story efforts. I started out last winter trying to approach it in a relatively structured way, creating a preliminary outline and writing real "scenes" and getting bogged down fairly quickly with uninspired and uninteresting stuff, or depending too much on a story I had written ten years ago. It was only after I allowed my work on the story to amount to ten minutes a day of free writing that I started to make any real progress on it, and had genuinely fresh ideas occur to me. Now, although it bears a good resemblance to my '99 story, it has new characters and a rather different mythology and I have, technically, enough material for a book series, if I wanted to get that ambitious.

So now I think I'm going to transition away from the morning pages and start cobbling together an actual outline. It's a bit early according to my timeline (writing in November after TD is out the door), but you have to go with the "flow," and I think the flow's moving towards writing.

I think.