One of the many reasons I love Stephanie Bearce is that she wrote a novel--a whole novel!--in 15 minutes a day.She did this after her husband died.
She had two children to take care of on her own.
She was afraid.
She imagined she just wouldn't have the time and energy to write--even though writing was the work of her soul.
(Stephanie is in good company, by the way. The first woman who ever made her living as a writer, Christine de Pizan, did so because her husband died and she needed to take care of her children.)
I, on the other hand, have in this moment a family intact, and I make my living as a professor--which means that, denial notwithstanding, classes begin for me next week. The momentum of LyNoWriMo has dissipated after the LA conference, and it is weirdly absorbing to explore Twitter.
Still, there is that public humiliation thing. Many wonderful people have asked how the novel is coming. So I determined not to post again till I had written 1,000 more words.
Which I did! I finished yesterday, weaving them into a day full of laundry, just-missed appointments, overshot bus stops, water and kitten-food concoctions in every bathroom, serendipitous meetings with neighbors in the neighborhood library, and electronic gadget failures.
Whew.
Now I can turn up the volume again on my Tweet Deck.
Stephanie is my hero! I'm so amazed at how productive she was during those tough times.
ReplyDeleteAnd good for you on getting so much of your novel finished in July. I'm a person who has a tough time moving on until I've gotten a semi-polished rough draft down. Unless I do, I'm never sure what happened. And if I don't know what happened in my character's past, how can I step into the future? (It sounds a bit ridiculous when you write it down, but I was just discussing the logic of a vegetable's life cycle for a friend's fantasy last Wednesday.