Day 19, freewrite 400 words
Well, that’s not hard. I am famous for not being able to shut up, not having a problem starting.
So, let’s see. Right now I’m sitting at my awesome desk, with my daughter’s rats on my shoulder. She’s cleaning their cage, and needed sitting. I guess this will be funny in like twenty years when I’m babysitting for her.
It’s the same desk in the picture of my rough draft. Man, I’m still proud about that. Took me so long to finish Starting Chains, when the rough draft of the first book took no longer than six weeks.
To be fair, nothing was going right or going on when I wrote Patterns. Starting Chains was written after PBW was in full swing, and I had a bunch of other story telling opportunities in the making. Looking back, I think I’m going to shut everything else down when I write the rough draft of the next book. Maybe write all my articles for a month in advance, and work just on the draft. Really pour ever bit of my creative energy on that one project for just as long as it takes.
Maybe. As much as I’d like to think my brain works that way, I’d probably get bored. No matter how many projects I have in motion, I always want to do something new. I’ve got a ton going on, now I want to take a day off to learn about ways to boost my twitter following. I have so many plans, so many ideas, that I can’t ever really focus on one long enough.
Honestly, I don’t know how I’ve managed to write two books in the same series already. Except for the fact that it’s the series that saved me.
In September of 2013, something really bad happened to my family. I’d made an outline for Broken Patterns, and made maybe a token effort at writing it. Then, my whole world flipped over. Nothing was going right in my life, and it all got worse for the next few months. The only thing that was going right, that made me feel in control, was my writing. I finished the last 500 pages in two weeks. As we went through a nightmare that included my husband nearly dying, a horrible custody fight, and a less than congenial parting of the ways with my old day job, my writing was my escape. My safety net after days and days of tears and torture.
Paper Beats World 
It seems from the start of this that maybe you’re in a better place in your life than you were in 2013, hopefully this perception is the case. I’m sorry for you to have suffered that torture in your life but quite glad for you that you had writing. This piece has come out then as an ode to writing and I share in your wanting to put it on a pedestal. Sometimes I am amazed by the transformative nature of writing, especially when it is so for just about everyone engaged in it.
You did well writing such a brief free-write! I tell you while I haven’t done mine yet I’ve certainly reminded myself it says “…at least 400 words…”, translation: it’s okay to write a lot more than that. 😉 So good job getting your point across, gliding from the humor in having rats on your shoulders (I have a screaming Cockatoo by my side) while you write to the pain you suffered but made it through in such a short post.
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Thank you. I know, I babble sometimes. But yeah, I am in a much better place than I was, or really have ever been. A lot of it was support from my wonderful husband, but I put a lot of it on the writing. It helped me keep my sanity.
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Very well done.
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