I’m waiting for my agent to finish reading through my big picture edits (see the last post) of my adult fantasy novel, let’s call it novel X.
What does one do in this time, except drive themselves mad with anxiety? Well, if you’re me, you have a very long list of to-do jobs. When I was querying and then waiting for my agent’s edit points, I completed my YA fantasy novel, set in the world of Slavic sea myths. And now is the perfect time to do the edits on that draft. The. Perfect. Time. So what do I do? I come up with a shiny Middle Grade novel idea that keeps me up at night and sends me to the reference texts for research.
I bat it away and plow away at the YA novel, which I am enjoying, I truly am. And it keeps coming back. Just one sentence, just the opening line… it whispers in my ear. And twenty minutes later I find I wrote the opening scene.
“No!” I shout and go back to my edits. To the edits of that really hard scene in the middle, where the dialogue just didn’t feel quite right and I need to change that one word but I don’t know to what…
Still, the new shiny idea beckons, as I grapple with the muddle of a scene.
Just the rough outline. It’s in your head anyway. You might as well write it down before you forget. Because you will forget. Remember that short story you dreamt up? The one you don’t remember, because you didn’t write it down?
“It was a stupid idea. All I could remember was a live sea being carved up by aliens.”
Perhaps. But you remembered how it feeeelt…
And so I obligingly tap-tappity-tap away on my keyboard.
But I’m at my favourite café today, sipping a latte and feeling strong! So no more distractions, no more diversions, no more interruptions!
But you have this dialogue in your head already… Maybe you can just…
SHUT UP!