Deadlines

In about a week, Revision 5 Novella Outline is going to be released. Normally, I would be excited. Or, at least, I'd expect to be excited. When the release date for Revision 4 drew near some months ago, I could barely contain myself. I may have been tired and exhausted, but I knew I was producing more for the story than every has been produced. But this week and this revision, I feel disappointed, even uninterested.

You see, I haven't worked on the outline for almost two weeks.

I wish I could explain why this has happened. Mostly it's just lack of ideas, and lack of energy. Life has also been hectic and stressful, draining me further. I find myself looking at the Outline, trying to imagine what to write for hours on end. Soon the evening is gone and I haven't written a single sentence. This alone is another kind of stress.

I have a terrible habit of expected too much from myself. "Wow, Tess, you're a meek one," you might be thinking. I tend to treat my projects like I treat work. It must be done, it will be done, the hell with how I feel about it. I believe it's the result of growing up in a Lutheran family in the Midwest. The air is thick with Protestant Ethic. The problem is that this doesn't work very well when it comes to creativity. it somewhat works when writing software, because you aren't required to be creative all the time. When it comes to writing, it seems far more taxing.

I could be wrong, of course. Just how much of the average novel is just "plumbing"? It's probably far more than I imagine. I'm not even writing at this moment, either. I'm doing little more than crafting the structure of the story. Maybe that's half the reason why it's so difficult. The outline is a compressed form of the story, focusing on the finer points.

There's also a psychological number game at work. Revision 3 was 13 pages long. When I reorganized Revision 4 to be easier to understand, it jumped to 17 pages. I then added another 13 pages of content. Now I'm working on Revision 5, and I've gone from 30 pages to 40. Ten pages of outline might be good enough for most people, but I still feel disappointed. I feel I should at least have added 13 pages.

It's possible that I'm just a little burned out right now. Revision 4 reached near obsessive levels when it came to working on it in the evenings. Or maybe, it was just easier. The ideas were easier to come up with because there was so little with which to start. Now that I'm getting deeper into the story, it may be trickier.