It wasn't such a long time ago that I was really excited about the idea of being back to writing. I was enjoying feeling like myself again, or something that felt like myself, because since I was very young, writing has been my thing and it's been the thing that got me through some of the worst moments of my life, even though it has brought me to some of the worst moments, too. (Losing novels never seems to get any easier.) Unfortunately the 'it's all going so well' thing didn't last as long as I wanted it to, and now I'm at the stage where I feel like everything that I am writing is boring, or total trash and instead of feeling great the last few days, it's felt like a bit of a slog and it's felt as though that slog is not worth it.
I felt the need to take a short break from the draft of the novel that I wrote - technically it's a novella at the moment but the intention is for it to become a novel by the time I am done with it - because I really needed to have some space from it, for one thing, and for another, much like with Fairies, I felt the need to let it breath for a bit before I start trying to continue drafting it and aim at getting draft number two done. Part of it is that I really think that I need to step away from the novel to make sure that when I re-read it, the characters are who I was thinking of, the story comes together the way it was meant to and that I have the time to think about it, and also not think about it, because re-reading over it before redrafting is definitely better when you don't remember every single bit of the plot line. I think it's also a bit of a hangover from having to redo Fairies not long after it was published because there was a word missing on the first page.
The problem with taking a break from that novel is every new idea I have had sucks. It sucks f**king hard, and when I'm sat there thinking, oh my God, I'm bored writing this it does make me question what it is the point of continuing working on that. I think sometimes I continue with it because I'm trying to keep up with the 4 the words quests and monsters, because it does help to keep me motivated, but I'm questioning right now if that is healthy. Maybe what I really needed was to take a step back from writing when I finished the draft, and take a week or so thinking about writing - so logging onto 4 the words and telling it that I'm thinking about writing, even if I'm not actively doing any - without actually writing, and then come back to do the first redraft. One of the reasons I don't want to do that, or that I can't really do that, is because it's Camp NaNo and I had committed myself to trying to write, on average, a thousand words a day. I am terrible at Camp NaNo and always have been, so the fact that I'm not managing to stick to that is no real surprise. I haven't actually managed to keep track of what I am doing or have been doing so I haven't kept the NaNo site up to date, and I'm just trying not to stress about that. I think the other reason I don't want to do the fully stepping back thing is that I took so long 'off' of writing from not having a proper, working laptop, so I think I would feel really guilty if I didn't keep writing. Even if everything that I'm writing is crap.
