To be honest, I haven’t made a lot of headway in the story since I posted about it. I finished Chapter 6, but then progress ground to a halt. There are always a lot of reasons why a work in progress stalls.
First off, as the weather is getting warmer, I’m getting out for more bike rides. Not only do I love riding my bikes (yes, plural), but I’m also casually training for a multi-day trip coming up in August. I say casually training because I’m not following a specific plan. More of a gut-feeling of slowly ramping up both frequency and duration of my rides so that I don’t want to die when game time comes.
Second, since I work on bikes for a living, that’s also ramping up. And between working on bikes all day, then coming home to ride my bike for an hour or more, by the time I get cleaned up from that, I’ve only got so much left in the tank.
And third, a lot of what is left in the tank goes toward just living life. I’m taking care of myself, my wife, hanging out with friends, playing music, reading, going to movies, mowing my lawn, cleaning the house, playing with my cats, and on and on.
Fourth and finally, I don’t have to. In the neverending battle between sitting on the couch and sitting at my computer, sitting on the couch often wins. I don’t have any external motivation to write the story. It’s not like going into work to wrench on bikes, where I need to be there at a certain time, be there for a certain amount of time, and can only do so much twiddling of my thumbs while I’m there.
But those are all excuses.
I still want to write. And I still want to write this story. And I’m still going to write this story. And I’m looking forward to it too. The other day, I was rereading some of the earlier chapters to get myself back up to speed with what I’d written so far, and I was getting excited thinking about how I wanted to the rewriting/editing process to go.
So what the hell is going and why don’t I feel like writing?
I’m resting. Which is okay. Like I need rest days from the bike, I need rest days from the computer as well.
It took me about 2 years to write Clean Freak, but that was with long periods of time spent resting between chapters and sections of the book. After Clean Freak was published, I thought that I was magically an Author, that I would jump into writing every day, and everything I wrote would be gold.
When it wasn’t, I panicked and gave into my inner critic.
When rest days turn into a rest month (I’m told that some saner people call this the ‘off-season’), I can’t just jump back on the bike and ride the same speed/distance as I had before my rest period. Same goes for writing. I feel like there’s nothing that should be stopping me from writing, just as (with the right gear) there’s no reason to ever stop riding.
At the same time, it feels like I’m sitting by the window, waiting for a sunny day to get back out there.
The Chimerical Dark 