Today I’m in a funk. Editing The Waste is much harder than I thought it would be. I sit down to work, but get distracted. I really want to edit it, but my actions say otherwise. I have no idea where the resistance is coming from. I’ve re-read the entire thing, so it’s not like I’m afraid to see what I wrote (that’s happened in the past). I’ve got the time and energy to do the work. I just don’t. My brain is a mystery to me sometimes. I wonder if it would help to tell myself ‘it’s only the second draft and it’s OK to suck’ . I’m frustrated because I feel like my path to becoming a published [...]

I’m working on my novel, currently titled The Waste, and it’s eating my brain. Although it’s the best novel I’ve ever written, it sucks on an almost infinite level and so I’m very thoroughly going through it to see what is good, salvageable, re-writable and just plain old drek. This week I am going through each scene, looking for conflict. I know not all conflict has to be bombings, or fleeing from the enemy, or anything outwardly dramatic, but even so there are some scenes that are just ‘tell the reader some stuff’ scenes, and there’s not a hint of conflict anywhere. Today I hope to finish going through Chapter 5, leaving 6 more chapters for the rest of the [...]