The First Block

As of today Sable is 22,300 words and 140 pages long and I hit my first writer's block at around page 125. 


I knew it would come-- it always does, but never has it happened to me after such a surge of exciting plot twists and character-driven action. The momentum built and built and I braced myself for the ride ahead expecting the sheer force of the words flowing from my fingers to easily carry me through the rest of the week. 


No sooner did I break the sound barrier then I fizzled out. I was losing speed fast and nothing I typed could give me the extra boost I needed to get me through my daily twenty pages. I tried to save myself; clawing at flowery words, tweaking my prose, and throwing characters into places they were never meant to go, making them say things they would never say. Which only turned them against me, dragging me down with pit-bull determination and vice-grip hands. I was plugging out the words ready to bang my head against the keyboard!


So I stopped writing. 


I backed away from my laptop and took a deep breath trying to evaluate the broken pieces and flimsy characterization. The editor in me tried to rear her ugly head, stabbing a boney finger at the screen barking at me to fix the typos, rewrite the scenes, and scrap all of the excess words that bulked up the story adding too much extra weight. 


I was ready to give up, call book two the end of it, and banish Sable into the dark, musty dungeon in my hard drive to suffer, never to see the light of day again. (My poor novel. I'm so harsh.) Instead of making any sudden decisions, in my foggy mental state, I went back to bed for an hour and a half to cool off.


After my alarm squawked me back into consciousness, I came back, told myself I wouldn't revise anything and took an honest look at my scenes, then I saw the problem... well at least the root of it.


I came off a real, fast-paced, adrenaline-pumped scene then the next one broke away from trying to stand its own ground. My sub-theme disconnected from the main theme, the backbone of the whole story. Oops. The whole time I tried to make the story flow smoothly from a detached appendage, losing sight of the root of the whole book. 


I can laugh now. It was so obvious, but my pride didn't want to let those 2,000 words go. I put the purpose (writing a 80,000 word YA fantasy novel) before the principle (writing to the best of my abilities, as I tell my characters' stories.) 


So I did get my 20 pages today, and it was hard overcoming the dreaded writer's block-- which I'm still trying to scramble over, darn it-- but I know it will get better. :)


At least until I hit the next one...