Getting back to business

Nano is over for another year, the holidays are behind me and now it’s time to think about my future. 2011 is already starting out promising with offers for me to speak, the potential for freelance in an area I love and the light at the end of the tunnel for the first two books in my Seasonal Sisters Series.

I almost completed the first draft of Autumn’s Healing, the second in the series, during NanoWriMo. It was an AWESOME feeling to write over 51,000 words in twenty days. I wrote on a blank page every day. The temptation to edit was almost non-existent. There’s always something you want to ‘tweak’. Temptation is a fact of life. But being in the moment of the story made it less of an issue.

Now I’m taking part in my local writers’ group JANO project. Just like NanoWrimo, we are expected to write 50,000 words over the course of the month. The two variances are that we have an extra day (meaning our words- per-day goal is slightly less) and that we can work on an existing WIP. We only count the NEW WORDS we’re tacking on to the existing project. Sounds easy, right? HA HA HA

With over fifty thousand words into Autumn’s Healing, I realize I only need about another twenty-five thousand to finish it. With that in mind and being seventeen days into JANO, I find myself wondering where to go. I’ve not written but about two hundred words towards the completion of the WIP. Do I start the next book in the series? Do I keep going with the positive outcome of having the completed first draft – don’t worry about hitting the 50k mark?

Every evening I sit at the keyboard with the intention of adding words to the story. Yet I find myself frozen. Not by writers block (something I don’t believe in) but what I’ve decided is more about a defeatist attitude. I’m focusing too much on JANO and not enough on what I do – Write a Good Story!

So with that in mind, I move forward… I think.