Hi there! Thanks for sticking around. I am still here — still working hard.

Here is what my planner page for last week looked like:

All those numbers in different  colors? Totally unrealistic estimates of the chapters I should be revising. (That’s why there are so many of them.) 🙂

After a few weeks of beating myself up for not reaching these totally crazy goals, I wrote back to my agent and asked her if we really really really have to do this on deadline.

Like a little girl I begged her, I just wanna have fun — whaaa . . .

Well, it turns out, that’s just the sort of thing she wants to hear. So she just coached me to stay with the story for as long as the story demands it, no worries allowed 🙂

Yay! 

Okay, so I still have my daily goals and deadlines. But they don’t crush me with their impossibility. This is what writing should be — at its purest — just spending time with characters — going along on their ride — learning and playing along with them, breathing in their world with them, so they can breathe back at you. Who knows what will become of this world I am building once I am done with it? Who cares? Not me. Not right now.

Oh, this is actually the best feeling. That’s what being a writer IS.