Another New Dawning: Keeping the Writing on Track

This morning, I sit here with my cup of hot coffee and I look out the window to see a fresh blanket of snow has covered the ground. I hear the plows out there scraping the roads, paving the way for the morning commute, but I'm not worried about that right now. I know I have an extra ninety minutes to write. Some mornings I journal, mostly to get anything that's playing in my head out there on the page. I want no distractions to defeat me in my work.

But this morning, I'm free of distractions...pretty much anyway. I did check in on school closings, and so I was aware of the morning headlines too. But I didn't linger. I had my assignment in mind.

Setting a deadline has been a great thing for me. It's given me a purpose and forced me to look at things I'd never looked at before: word and page count specifically. I never wanted to be so glossy, so caught up in the specifics of pushing forward like that with my book. One of my writing partners has been nudging me along, though. She's given me a deadline for the first time with this book. Last time we sat down together, I told her I didn't think our deadline was realistic. I mean really...the end of February? C'mon. I have a full time job to do.

She stood firm. I objected...you have this book almost written, I said. You know all your plotlines, your writing comes out perfect from the start. She laughed at me. Yeah, right, she said. Who has it all figured out, really?

I was thinking about that today...as I approached my own work. I realize the pitfall I'd taken and stayed in for years. The US and THEM theory. Others look so great, so polished, so complete. It's been my critic living large and well-inhabited in my brain. I haven't been working, really working on a regular basis, producing pages...I'd been back-tracking again, trying to polish and perfect. So today, as the dawn was breaking, I was pushing my seven not-so perfect pages out there. And I found, just like  I always have, that a lot of gifts come when characters are placed in an uncomfortable situation and allowed the time to interact. Tonight, I may change it up a bit...but tomorrow, I know, I've still got to push forward if I want to make some kind of reasonable point of completion on this.

Life, writing...go figure; an actual deadline would be the thing to get me unstuck! Progress, not perfection is just what I need.