Over the last six months or so I’ve been crafting a 77,000 word beast of a romance novel. The majority of it was written during #NaNoWriMo, which means I shoveled 50,000 words of sand into my sandbox.
I took December off but this week I have been editing, chiseling away to find sandcastles. It has been so long since I’ve edited a novel, I had forgotten how much I enjoy it. Scenes are getting rearranged, entire characters cut. But I’m fleshing out the story and breathing life into the characters who remain.
With memoir there’s no real surprise. I mean, hi. I lived it. And while I know how this story ends, there is so much wonder and discovery in the process. It’s been a long, loooong time since I’ve written fiction and I’m finding surprises along the way that I did not at all see coming.
I’m still a long way from finished, but it’s starting to feel like a real novel. With characters and a story I love. Both Friday and Saturday I stayed up way past my bedtime writing and editing because I wasn’t ready to leave this world yet. (I also can’t take credit for the sandcastle metaphor. It comes from Shannon Hale.) #writersofinstagram #amwriting #amediting @dabblewriter #writingcommunity #writing #romancebooks #romancewriter #romancenovels #novelist
It’s a #newmoon and 2020 is just days away, making it the perfect time to do a reading at the altar I made for myself last night!
Since August I’ve been reading my #tarotcards at my computer desk but lately the energy has been feeling off. I think because I didn’t have a dedicated space I wasn’t really dedicating time. It was just one more thing to check off my morning to do list rather than a deliberate time to think and journal. So coming home last night I repurposed an end table that had been sitting here for a year or two without any real function.
The change in energy was instant, and honestly if you look at my home office I have a lot of so called altars dedicated to specific fandoms, so this is just the latest.
I didn’t necessary ask anything specific, I just used a New Moon tarot spread from @newagehipster333 and the general message seems pretty clear to me: Stop fucking around and just do the work. (The exact message is a little more nuanced but that’s the general gist.) I know exactly what this is talking about and the message isn’t wrong. I have only a handful of scenes left in my novel so I’m thisclose to being done and I think imposter syndrome is kicking in, but also in my mind I’m already thinking about agents and publishing even though I still have to finish the fucking first draft and edit and all of that.
I am off work until January 6 and sitting down and focusing and writing those scenes and finishing this draft was always the plan for next week and this just reconfirmed that. JUST DO THE FUCKING WORK.
#tarot #wayhometarot #tarotreading #writersofinstagram #amwriting #newmoonritual #newmoonmagic #newmoonintentions #tarotcommunity #tarotspread
