Ah, the Muse

So.

I'm working on writing my novel, or rather I'm sitting here blogging instead of writing my novel because it's really easy to get distracted. I think I have to become one of those "first-thing-in-the morning" writers because the 3-4 pm time is really my most useless time of day (and yes, you may point out that it's only a quarter to 2 and I'm still rather useless, aren't I?). I was so good last week and wrote a lot, even 12-15 pages at one sitting, but I know I need to just sit down and pound it out. It's feeling a lot like my thesis. The word /thesis/ sits pretty heavily down on me as a new topic that caused (a) a lot of procrastination in starting it (b) a lot of procrastination in doing it (c) the feeling that when I did it, I ought to be more monumental that what I actually had to say and (d) a certain degree of stiffness in the writing because, after all, it was my THESIS. I think the same thing goes with writing a novel. Somehow I'm more embarrassed to tell people that I'm writing a novel than that I'm working on some short stories or something. I think it's because a short story is something someone can just do for a lark while writing a novel evokes a certain degree of authorial solemnity.

The point being... I just have to get it done. It doesn't have to be that good because it probably won't be that good because of the hugeness of the word novel, but once I get it down then I can finally get comfortable with the idea that I can just write up novels sometimes. This is just a practice run of writing something long and finished. I've started other projects of writing a novel, but finished seems to be the hardest part. So even though I just want to sit here and blog instead of working on the novel itself, I just ought to pound out some pages, even if they're dumb and get closer to the end of this monstrosity, or (as I called my thesis), the big slouching beast.


In other news, however, the poetry manuscript is going swimmingly. It should be ready by the end of this week.

Comments

Sarah T. said…
What's the topic of your novel?
mlh said…
it's a murder mystery

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