Writing through the Rough Spots

Last night my goal of 5 pages came to a screeching halt. The air conditioning wasn’t working, the children weren’t sleeping, and so I moved the entire household downstairs to where it was actually cooler than 87 degrees Fahrenheit (and for those of you on the Celsius scale, I have no idea how much that really is. Probably 3.14 or 666 or something like that. :whistle:)

Anyway, while the baby screamed, I set up my laptop and glared at her.

Me: You WILL go to sleep in the “Pack and Play.”
Her: Like hell, Mom.
Me: Knock it off. Lie down and close your eyes.
Her: (melodramatic wailing, complete with flailing arms and legs).

So I wrote in the dark for an hour while she kept peeking to make sure I wasn’t leaving. My son, who was on an air mattress, was fascinated by the prospect of sleeping in the living room and making faces at his sister. To make a long story short, they eventually fell asleep but I only accomplished three pages. When I got to the fourth page and my heroine was nodding and smiling for the third paragraph and I was starting to doze off, I decided that entire page had to go.

Tonight I accomplished somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 pages. I’m starting to get over the rough spot. I think sometimes you have to plunge forward and KEEP GOING even when you haven’t any idea where it’s going or WHY you are writing such weird stuff. It’s like you have to trust your subconscious writer to take you in the right direction.

Or, the other possibility is that once you’ve written the scene in all the wrong ways, the right way will suddenly emerge.

In any case, I’m proud that I did get past the bad spot and hopefully the book is staying solid. I’m on page 161. My goal for the week was to get to page 200 by Sunday, but I don’t know how realistic that will be. Depends on how much I can get done at work (tomorrow’s the last day for the kids; Friday is my last day) to free up my writing hours.

Now, off to relax.