Daydreamer's Block

I’m afraid progress on my next book has been very slow. And when I say slow, I mean

s

l

o

w.

The basic idea first came to me well over a year ago. I was in the middle of the Coffee and Donuts series at the time, and the idea didn’t fit within that series. It mostly didn’t fit because I knew it would need a much longer timeline than the three weeks in each of those books.

I get ideas I don’t have time for all the time so that wasn’t a big deal. I wrote out some notes and tucked them away for after I finished that series. But by the time I’d finished the last Coffee and Donuts book, my kids had been asking me to write something for them for a lot longer. I pulled out my notes for Wisherton instead. I only intended to write the first book for that series. I dove straight into the second one.

Once book 2 was done, I was finally ready to go back to that other idea. I hunted the notes for what I planned to be my next book.

I couldn’t find them.

I spent several days (on and off) flipping through notebooks in what I thought was a very organized system.

The notes did turn up. But I had been thinking about the project while I searched for those notes and what I thought I wrote didn’t quite match up with what I actually wrote. I had to decide where to correct my notes and where to correct my thinking, which felt an awful lot like starting over.

I think it was my resistance to starting over that made the story and characters harder to imagine. Every time I tried to picture a scene, my brain rebelled and started thinking up chores I could do instead. This strikes me as thoroughly backwards. For a lot of people, daydreaming interferes with getting work done. For me, daydreaming is how I get work done. I need to get the book in my head before I can get it on paper. My head just hasn’t been cooperating.

Don’t worry, I don’t give up easily. I will persevere. I will keep trying until I can spend full days absorbed in a fantasy. Then I will finally be making progress.