Days 11, 12, & 13

Or, novel prepping without consciously prepping

Day 10

Is reader’s block a thing? I have been having trouble reading the last few days. I have books I want to read (articles I need to read for Unruly Figures), but it’s like my brain simply cannot process anything. I read a paragraph again and again and again and nothing sinks in.

Day 11

"We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect."
-Anaïs Nin

Day 12

I’m acutely aware that we’re in the second weekend of October, or Preptober as the NaNo folks refer to it. I’m normally not deep into planning at this point, but this year I wanted to take this month to really think about what I’m going to work on next and lay some groundwork.

I spent a few days earlier this week working on a short story that I haven’t been able to figure out the ending of. It’s a story I’ve picked up and put down a number of times over the last seven years. I even published the opening scene here. I had a long talk with one of my writer friends about it, hoping that just talking about it with someone else would help me see the ending. At the end of that conversation, he was basically saying, “Your problem is that it’s a novel, not a short story.”

And I realized—Fuck! The damn thing is a novel. And, worse, I don’t think this Jeff character that I’ve been writing is actually the main character.

I picked up this story because I wanted something short to work on to warm up the ol’ fiction muscle before moving on to the novel I actually want to work on during NaNo. But with only an inkling of the plot and no idea who the main character is, I knew I couldn’t finish it before November, when I had promised myself I would work on a different novel. I couldn’t bear the thought of putting off that other novel any longer.

I chose. I shelved this vampire story—now a novel—again.

kalesalad

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I started the Writer’s Notebook as a 28-day challenge to find joy in writing again. Traditionally, a writer’s notebook is a collection of observations, reactions, ideas, questions, memories, quotes, sketches, lists, snippets of moving language, or some combination of the above. (Sometimes they’re also called Commonplace Books!) Want to join in? Leave a comment below and I’ll check out your work!

I got a few complaints from folks about the number of emails in this series, so I’ve been combining days this week. It coincided with a week of overwhelm and anxiety for me, so it was bound to happen anyway.

All that said, if you don’t want to receive emails in the Writer’s Notebook series, that’s okay! Just go to your Substack profile, find your subscription to Collected Rejections, and uncheck the box next to that section. Or just email me and I’ll take care of it for you!