“I’m officially back from holiday and so ready to get back to my daily routine!”
That’s what I wanted to say in my post over a week ago, but I didn’t. I ended up not even publishing any posts at all… The reason why I didn’t is because I was embarrassed that I hadn’t managed to write as regularly as I’d wanted during my holidays, and I felt like I had to come back with a big win in order to catch up from the lost time. But that big win didn’t come because it can be tough for me to return to my usual routine after some time off, and this time was no exception. To this day I still haven’t returned completely to my previous routine, and I definitely haven’t reached any “big win” yet. That alone wouldn’t be a problem, but it made getting back to writing harder. And with every day that passed without me making progress, I felt more and more ashamed, which made it even harder to get back to it. I know, it’s a weird way to behave, but that’s what my brain does, and it’s taking me a lot of courage to write this post today. But I’m so glad I’m doing it. It can be so hard for me to return to a task after I felt like I failed at it, but this post is the beginning of it, and the first step is always the hardest, which is why I’m proud to be taking it right now.
On the novel writing side, since my last post I had four writing sessions, one right after returning from holidays over a week ago, and the other three were all this week. Getting back to my novel feels really hard after so much time away from it. I lost the momentum, and I feel like I don’t “remember” where I was headed. I feel out of it. I’m slowly getting back my feel for it, and today I felt some excitement again about the adventure of my protagonist, but even today I still had trouble with the actual “putting words on the page” part of the writing. But I’m trying to push through and to remind myself that it’ll get better again. The more I write, the easier it’ll get, and the easier I’ll be able to submerge myself into the story.
My original goal is to finish writing the first draft by the end of this month which, after my recent writing sessions, I’m starting to stress about. This fact also played a role in me not returning to writing since my brain had this childish belief that if I didn’t look at my story and its lack of progress with it, it wasn’t really true. But the lack of progress is true, and time hasn’t stopped simply because I didn’t write. Luckily, I managed to remind myself of it, and I finally returned to writing. I honestly don’t know if I’ll make it before the end of this month, but I’m for sure still planning on giving it my best effort. This means that for the next few weeks, I’ll have to be really consistent and put in as much work as possible. Reaching my goal is still realistically possible, but it’s going to require a lot of effort on my part, which I’m a little scared of… Oh well, I guess time will tell. I’ll do my best to keep you updated.
Another quick note that I wanted to add before finishing for today is that, even though I sort of slowed down with my writing, and that I hadn’t posted anything here for the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working on some other things that I’m pretty excited about, but you’ll have to stick around to find out more.
It’s good to be back!