Starting Over In April

Yesterday was Easter, and we did Easter Basket Hunts and all of that stuff, but it was actually more chill by far than Saturday was.

It was utterly beautiful weather here in Houston, warm and breezy, and I sat in the shade on my hammock for hours...but I wasn't at peace that whole time. I had this worry in the back of my head bugging me. I had to write today, and I didn't know what I was going to write.

I've found that once I get into something, I can write on it and write on it without too much trouble, but what do I do once I'm done? Before starting a project, I usually spend a lot of my free time thinking about it, working out details of characters and plot. But I didn't prepare myself to be done with my story that I finished on Saturday. I hadn't started planning, or working out details on anything.

I have Sunny & Gray Book 2 sitting in my Google Drive, laying fallow for almost two years, and I thought I could go back to that...but it's been such a long time since I last wrote on that, that I don't remember all the details. I wouldn't want to jump in, and write a bunch of crap that contradicts everything that I've said so far. I need to read it again first, before I dive in.

What could I write TODAY? Because I have pledged to write every day. I have to write something TODAY. I guess I could do planning for something, and call that writing, but I never have in the past. To me, it has to be words toward a final word count of a story or a novel. Otherwise it's not writing. Am I wrong to think that? Do I need to change my thinking?

I suppose I probably do, but it's pretty ingrained and I'm not sure how to change my mind.

So, all day long, I cast about, trying to come up with something that I could work on this very day. It's weird, because in the drawer in my mind, I have a ton of ideas that are waiting to be written. See my story "The Battle of the Ideas" that we ran on the Dunesteef. That's based on my reality. But for some reason, none of those ideas were clamoring to be let out of the drawer. Again, it usually takes me at least a few days of thinking about some idea to plan enough and get excited enough to start working on it.

All the way to 11:00 PM, I wondered what I would write. I remembered that I'd had a silly, little simple idea for a super quickie of a story a month or two ago. It was good enough that I could remember it a week or two later, but now that I needed it, it was gone. I couldn't remember it at all. Maybe it'll return someday.

I sat down to the computer and pondered my options, and went through some old files. I came across my notes for my book series idea called The Gauntlet, and I realized that I had done enough planning for the prologue of that first book that I could totally write it. So, I did. I put 5 words down, and got most the way through the prologue before calling it a night. Interestingly, I've done enough thinking about The Gauntlet over the years that I could certainly keep going after I finish the prologue. I don't have to quit there. I think I know it well enough that I could proceed from there. Maybe it's finally time for The Gauntlet to be written.

I don't have enough time to get a picture of my chart, but I'll put the word count down here for you:

Words Sunday: 573
Words Total: 12697