Block

I have a serious case of writer's block. Like, I'm not into any of my projects now. I think there's a few reasons for this, ones I don't want to go into, and a couple that I do.

Firstly, like I said in my optimism thread (weird place to put it, I know) I was doing thousands of words in a day. I did nearly 200k in the 100k in 100 days challenge. My weekly average was 12k. Then I did the convention, and above reasons happened, and I think I burnt out.

But also, I think it's because one of these projects is for my writing group. We're doing a Christmas anthology for 7-12 year olds. This is the first time they'll see my writing. The deadline is Saturday. Before today, after two writing sessions (seriously!) I had 292 words. I've done 379 today in an hour. I once did 1200 in a half hour sprint! I think I'm finding it difficult because hey, the weather outside is beautiful and I'm writing about Christmas, and I'm not sure whether the piece will work for the group/the target audience, and people will be paying to read this and it's been done in a few weeks, instead of several years like my Uprooted series. I have to meet 2k with this story and I'm not confident I'll hit anywhere near the target. Also, this isn't like my stories where I've planned and planned and planned, this has pretty much been a pantser story. As in, writing by the seat of my pants.

Sarah-Jane brainstormed with me last week to get a resolution to the story, which I love, but I think it's going to need a lot of work and we'll only have so many edit options.

I think it's bleeding through to my other projects as well. Maybe this blog post (which has taken me ten minutes and is already more than I've written today, dammit!) will help with inspiration for any one of them, but I think there's more to it than that. Maybe the guest post I'll be writing for Sarah-Jane's book blog (which hopefully I could post here too) will also help me figure stuff out? We'll see.