Today

Both of my children are resting in their rooms. It's quiet time. I'm sitting down to write. I've waited all day for this moment-- even took my kids to two different sprinkler parks this morning to wear them out and give me an opportunity to write. It's wonderful to get a few words down before the exhaustion of a long day sets in at night.

But I'm staring at my screen, looking at the 39,000 words that make up my current work in progress, and typing nothing. I feel frozen. And all I can think is how I'm so bad at this.

The crazy thing is, I'm not.
But I am.

The first time I write a new scene or a new conversation into my book I hate what I've written. I have to stare at it, touch it up, shape, and mold it before I start to think that maybe it's not so bad after all.

This works great with short stories. Writing a novel is a different beast.

And all I can do is say that for today, I'm going to try.

At WIFYR, one of the literary agents, John Cusick, gave a great presentation about writing. His advice was to stop worrying about the book and focus on writing a page or a single scene. No matter how bad you feel, no matter how intimidated you might be, everyone can handle a page.

Even if it stinks.

That's what I'm going to do now. I'm going to end this blog post. I'm going to write the stinkiest page of all. And it will be all right because after I've gotten it down, I'll go back and make it amazing.

Someday my whole book will be polished to hilarious middle-grade perfection.

But only if I can force myself write one really awful page today.