Dateline 9-17-2017

Last night turned out to be a pretty successful night that played out just the way I predicted it would which is exactly why I pushed my goal to start rewriting my novel off until the weekend where I would have a full day to settle in rather than start during the week when I have way more distractions.

The day started as usual, I woke at a decent hour then walked to the store to buy junk food to comfort me for later in the night when I planned to start acclimating myself into a non-fiction/non-blogging frame of mind. As I said yesterday, it's been over three years since I worked on a fiction piece that wasn't part of my ghostwriting freelance work so I was worried as to how long it would take me to rediscover my stride.

As soon as I got home, I wrote my Daily Breaker post then took a swim with my nephew before watching and reviewing yesterday's episode of Saturday Night Live to then sit and stare at the computer waiting for inspiration to strike. I knew going into the day that there would end up being a bit of a break required to shift gears from blogger mode into the mindset I need to write standard prose so I lied down and took a nap.

After about an hour, I woke up dazed and confused because my brain wasn't fully awake. By this point, it was getting pretty late in the day which started to make me nervous due to my false start earlier in the week. With my new blogging schedule where I normally wrap things up by late afternoon, I've lost confidence in my ability to be productive in the middle of the night.

That said, no matter how hard I tried, I found it difficult to knuckle down and get to work until the sky was dark. I didn't even end up opening the first draft file until a little after 8:00 in the PM, which psychologically has been my last call hour when it comes to doing work. This led to a bit of a hurdle but I knew if I stuck to it my old late night habits would eventually return like a duck to a dive bar that doesn't have any nails.

Things started out extremely slow as I spent more time formatting the document to look like an actual book with a cover, title page, copyright page, list of other works, dedications, intro, and even a famous quote. It wasn't until damn near midnight that I actually started to write.

This may sound like I wasted a lot of time but I truly feel that the extra effort to make this draft look like a real deal book actually made me twice as excited about making this effort a reality because when midnight stuck and the busy work was done, I hit the ground running and didn't stop until I was falling asleep in my seat.

When before, I was just into the idea of working on this second draft, I am not 100% on board with the actual process and now that I've broken the seal I am no longer concerned by what day it is and whether or not I'll be able to get into the mindset required to work. As I said from the moment that I decided to delay my rewrite efforts, I knew that I just needed one full day to myself to get off a solid start.

Now I can't wait to get started on today's writing session because not only do I have the full day to myself being that it's still the weekend but all of my doubts have been conquered so I can't wait to really dig in.

As always, we'll see what ends up happening and I'll check in tomorrow with what does.

Talk to you then,

The Wicker Breaker