Good Decisions

So the first full day after temporarily abandoning the story that was giving me grief for two goddamn months made me very glad I made the decision.

If you care, the post about deciding to let a story go when it's not working is right here. I agonized over it, but finally decided that the second Hawthorne story just wasn't ready to come out of the metaphorical man-womb yet, and I had other things that were going cold in the meantime. I dropped Hawthorne, promising myself to get back to it later.

And yeah, it was a good call. Today I pumped out the first five pages of a new novella that will be done by the end of February, and it all came so easy and clean it reminded me of why I love to write-- a feeling I'd lost touch with the last two miserable unproductive months.
I also wrote a three page outline for another novella. Over all, an excellent day of work.

On those occasions when it comes easy, when it feels like the whole story was already right there in your skull just waiting for you to spill it out onto the page... that's a great feeling. It feels almost like you're tapping into some weird realm, some alternate dimension where the characters and situations already exist and it's all just too eager to allow you to pull it over to this side and give it life here.

So anyway, enough rambling and half-ass metaphorical imagery. I'm shutting it down for the day, but I'm actually EXCITED to get back to it tomorrow.