30 Days of Fika Books: Eighteen

Days like today are exactly what this daily blogging challenge is about.

I've got a rotten headache, I took on a wee freelance gig that I'm excited about but it's mucked up my plans for this week, and my to-do list feels a bit like a giant game of Jenga threatening to topple over and drown me! The last thing I feel like doing is blogging. But then the last thing I feel like doing is working, full stop 🤣

We all have days like that, but when you write novels, it's all too easy to convince yourself you'll catch up tomorrow. It's such a big piece of work that the deadline feels so far away it's practically abstract... until suddenly it is WAY too close! Plus, an actual part of the writing process is days of going on walks and letting the story percolate around your brain; sometimes it's tricky to know when you're at a stage when you legitimately need to do that versus just really want to play hooky.

I always kind of get there in the end, and over the years have learned to accept that mini-rollercoaster of mucking about and driving myself nuts for weeks followed by a mad stressful frenzy at the end! There's no really way to avoid it altogether, but I'm definitely finding this new mode of having a few smaller pieces of work that must be done each week for the newsletter, hugely helpful. Most weeks I'll also make some progress on the bigger projects, but if I've at least got these posts out + written and prepped everything for the newsletter, then that's not a bad bare minimum!

As Stephen King once said, talent is cheaper than salt. What separates talent from success is a whole lot of hard work. A great chunk of that hard work is simply forcing yourself to put words -- any words -- on the page (screen, whatever!) They say that everyone has a novel in them, and while I don't really think that's true, I definitely think that getting the novel out of you is the important bit. And that starts with committing to write every day, whether or not you feel like it.

After all, worst case scenario you can write a whole post about how you've got nothing to say😜