Saturday Slog

Oh, I had plans. Ambitions, even.

I work seven days a week. My main gig is a 9 to 5, M to F kind of thing. I pick up an additional twenty hours each week. It’s remote editing that I do from home. Do not be excited for me. Think of the driest kind of writing you can imagine editing. Then, remove even more moisture. That’s me.

During the week, I’ll generally wake up at a ludicrous hour and do sixty minutes or so of the editing thing. I’ll do another hour after my main job. On the weekends, I do five hours of editing work each day. It’s a lot. Real life and the cat food and cute sneakers required by it interfere with my writing.

My work in progress is ambitious and I have recently refocused on my creativity. I woke up extra early so I could get the part-time job out of the way and get to composing. I had a six hour block. A mammoth amount of time by my standards.

The scene I’m working on is a detailed film in my head. I know the place, floor to ceiling. I know the things that need to be said. I know each little beat required to move through the scene and propel the book. Still, it was a slog. One thousand five hundred and seventy-one words. I had planned on around four thousand. I thought I’d be deep in the next scene, which is truly pivotal. In that scene, blam-o: inciting incident.

But the horse must come before the cart. And making that horse move was a goddamn slog today. It’s a complicated set up to the event that launches the whole story into motion. It’s full of complex moving parts and shows the reader much about a pair of main characters. On top of that, there’s a good bit of fun in it.

All in all, worth grinding my jaw over.

PHOTO: Sometimes I play with visuals when I’m dreaming about or planning tone and texture. This is one of those.

PROGRESS REPORT: I’ve just given you one. You can’t get blood from a stone, you leeches!