Break Through

I finally pushed myself through my weird writing issues yesterday! It's been about a month since I've really done anything with my writing. Impatience to hear back from the agent or to hear about the job held me up for most of that time. Then finding out I'd been laid off get me away from writing the rest of the month. Finally on Friday I decided to change my attitude. The Waiting Game was making me miserable. I realized that I should just assume I would be out of a job for at least the month of April, and that I could use that time to write full-time. If a job possibility comes up to change that assumption, great. But I'm not going to count on it, and I'm going to stop hawking the phones and my email expecting it.

So I spent Friday evening and all day Saturday getting used to the idea of a Unemployed and Full-time Writing April. As Saturday wore on, I could feel the job impatience fade and the writing impatience build. But in a good way. Writing impatience as in my Muse saying, "C'mon, Kellie! Let me at 'em!" I should've guessed on Friday that when I got a decent chunk of inspiration for Strings of Betrayal that I would be ready to dive back into my writing. It's been a long time since I've received scenes for that book. Granted, it still didn't tell me much about my hero. That man's another tight-lipped ingrate like Darren. By Saturday evening, I told myself I was going to write on Sunday. I was just going to say "Screw it" to whatever hang-ups I still had about my HD revisions. I was just going to ignore the sense of "This is WAY too much work" that was bothering me about The Masque and look at some research ideas.

And that's what I did on Sunday. I even did a few things for Strings of Betrayal: I created a Write Way doc for it and started transferring the notes I already had into that doc; I redid the map so it was bigger and accurate to what I wanted; and I did tarot readings for the four main characters. I didn't have time to do any interpreatations, but I wrote down the results for a later interp. I did all the SoB (what an unfortunate acronym) work while watching A&E's The Last King. The only reason I watched it was because of Rufus Sewell. And my warped memory of history told me that Charles II was the king during the American Revolution. Isn't that the last king that matters to me? :) My AP US history teacher is weeping if he's reading this - as are any of my readers who have a passing interest in English history. I should've taken a moment to read the blurb about this show, or even to have looked up Charles II on the Internet so I'd have a better idea what I was going to devote 4 hours of my Sunday night to. Because as near as I can tell, the only big deal about Charles II was that he fought to stay out from under the thumb of Parliament. And it took him four hours of sleeping around with various women, watching plague and fire take London (which seemed to have nothing to do with anything about the Parliament buisness except to provide stunning dramatic "cliffhangers" for A&E to end an episode with), and yelling about how he would name his heir not Parliament or about how he would not stand for ill-treatment of Catholics. Overall, I was very glad I spent the entire four hours doing stuff for my writing and only half paying attention to the show. I would perk up whenever they took that God-awful wig off Rufus' head or when he was wearing somewhat revealing top or when he was fencing. But that's about it.

So yesterday was a stunning entrance back into the writing world. And it feels like it's going to last and that the attitude adjustment will help me immensely. I'm sure I'll have bouts where I just can't stand the fact that I don't have any Answers. I just hope they'll be much more short-lived than they have been until this weekend.