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This is a reply to a comment made on my last blog post and I thought it had something for everybody.

Adrienne,

Thank you for the comment and welcome to the club! I agree on your point about the pressure to write and complete. It is and has always been mostly my own expectation and pressure to hurry up and write and not an external force.

Stealing from a blog post I wrote years ago:

“Mirror, mirror on the wall who is the fairest of us all? What do you see when you steal a glimpse of yourself in a reflection? Generally speaking we are our own worst critics, downplaying the good and highlighting the bad. If we have a positive thought about ourselves, we almost have to combat it with a negative to maintain the balance between me and I.”

We are cursed and extremely blessed to be the force behind our art. It necessitates a balance of writing time and time spent establishing oneself in other aspects. I often wish I had more time to write, a dark and quiet space that I can slink away to and focus. I have not achieved the balance yet and I am jealous of my time though I waste much of it.

One of the ways I reenergize my writing is focusing on a character or scene that grabs my attention and running with that string of events until it is complete and then look for another. I wrote my first book mainly in order but my second was written by character. Once I finished the books storyline for one I would go to the next. It was easier to force completion but harder to figure the chapter spacing. I spent many hours with the printed pages on my floor, fitting them together like a puzzle piece. Once that was done, I went back and wrote/edited the chapter endings to better transition to another character, etc.

There are all sorts of trick I have used to fool myself into writing! Thank you for purchasing my book and I hope you enjoy it!

Mark