016—Direction

Our thoughts create our reality - where we put our focus is the direction we tend to go. ~Peter McWilliams

It’s been far too long since I’ve posted a blog. Maybe it’s a medium that’s fizzling out, perhaps it’s just life itself in the way of being able to sit down and post about my thoughts in the midst of full-time work, a house, and attempting to get my creative thoughts into a new novel. That said, and as usual, my attendance at the Collingswood Book Festival yesterday fired me up to write.

Surrounded by amazing authors from Southern New Jersey and beyond, I not only met amazing people and brought home a massive haul to my TBR pile, but I became inspired. Sure, I have a self-published novel I’m proud of and sold a few copies during the course of my assistance with the South Jersey Writers’ Group, but I was astounded looking around at the number of other writers, many selling multiple books, full series, and it made me think of one word.

Direction. Writers have direction.

Saying that I’ve been working on multiple projects currently is a huge overstatement. I haven’t been working on multiple projects. I’ve been thinking about them, occasionally looking at them, once in a blue moon adding a hundred or two-hundred words…and truly, it’s once in a blue moon. The Ghost of Time Forgotten was pretty well plotted as I wrote it. My current work in progress sitting around 56,000 words has been almost entirely ‘pantsed,’ and I find myself trying to get myself out of jams along with my main character, but it’s simply not coming to me the way I feel it should, and I haven’t had the time to sit there with my cast of characters figuring out the best way to do so…

But maybe I don’t have to. Like all the authors I spent time with yesterday, they just wrote the damn thing. If I continued at my current pace, I’d never have the ability to showcase multiple incredible works like everyone I met yesterday. Imposter syndrome? Possible. A solution? Easy.

Direction. Forward. Push ahead. Progress. Pick a direction and go, and make damn sure it’s not backward. Like our personal lives, we should strive to make our story more complete, to make sure our endings create abundant satisfaction, to make sure that we go back into our revision and editing process, we look at the things we should have seen prior and create something more, even if it means “killing our children.” (That’s scrapping whole pieces and sections of our story for those unaware…don’t call the police)

I’m going to write this weekend. I’m writing right now, and it’s the first blog post I’ve done in a long, long time. And when I open that novel, when I look at that story, I’m moving one direction…

Forward. Let’s go.