In the midsts of some medical misadventures right now, I realize that no one else is expecting me to be able to make progress in writing. I realize, too, that I need to give myself grace when the only people expecting normality in the house are the cats.
Okay, the cats aren’t expecting normality, either. In fact, our ancient arthritic Kili-cat is miffed that Peter is recovering enough from his surgery to be back at the computer and doing a little very light housework, and no longer will spend all day napping with her on demand.
Still, I’d like to be writing. So, rather than anguish at the blinking cursor on the blank page, I’ve just been showing up and seeing if I get lucky. Reading over old things, even stuff I got stuck on and declared a dead fragment long ago…
It worked, eventually. Words aren’t flowing like they used to, but over the course of a week, I finally figured out where an old dead WIP broke, what structurally went wrong, and even started to come up with how it could be fixed. It’s not the thing I want to be working on – heck, I abandoned it five years ago – but I’ll take the good enough instead of waiting for the perfect.
In a perfect world, I’d get into the Flow state again, and manage to knock out the partial manuscripts hanging fire, and have a Year of Six Books. In reality, I’ll just take no setbacks on wound care, and maybe 100 words this week.
Be kind to yourselves, and give yourself grace… but keep showing up, and giving yourself the opportunity to get what you want done.
Mad Genius Club 
6 responses to “Showing Up”
I’m surprised that I finally got the Hunter/Traitor story finished, and was able to start something new. A lot of schedule changes have got my work pattern discombobulated, even after three months to settle in. Plus Life running in the background.
I desperately wanted to finish something last spring before an avalanche of life happened, and so I declared it done. Then a kind person read it and said more or less, this is a great 80,000 word outline, what are you going to do about it? And the avalanche roared down. But I think I finally fixed it and it’s a much better story and should be out in a month. I’m still close to 80,000 words but they are different and better. It did always look like progress over the last few months, but it really was!
It did NOT always look like progress…
It can be a stabilizing factor in chaos.
What a great post—It’s taken me decades to learn this, and I still need reinforcement! Here’s hoping that your days are full of grace.
May they be so for us all. Thank you!
I’m still waiting for your next Combined Operations novel!!