Getting started is the hardest part--for me at least. Midway through the summer, I turned in the latest draft of the book I've been struggling with for a few years now. It may not be done yet, but while I wait for my editor to read it and let me know what she thinks, I have to do something--anything--else, just to keep from fretting. Besides, I can't let my valuable summer writing time go to waste. So I've started writing something new--a novel, I hope--and every day since I've struggled with some nagging questions: Am I really ready to commit to this new project, to give the next few years to it? Will anyone ever want to read it? Can I make it work? And why is it that I choose to spend my summer days in a chair, in a room, staring at a computer screen?
Some days the writing goes well, and the day flies. Other days, not so much. I'm 64 pages in now, with just a few precious weeks left before I go back to teaching and before I have to squeeze my writing in around the margins of all the things that urgently must be done. I'm determined to make these next few weeks really count, to get as deep into the novel as I can so that it keeps calling me back, even when the school year starts and I'm at my busiest and most distracted...so that it refuses to stay unwritten.
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