Working Through It

It's been a pretty hectic couple of weeks for the TriMu. We've had a lot of writerly stuff going on and that's taken its toll on us all. (See Sarah's post from last Friday for more details of the tragic brain explosion.) I've also had some personal stuff going on that's been dragging my brain off in ten thousand other directions, none of which involves a familiar.

But through all of that, there are still things that need to be done, other projects that cannot be abandoned in light of our having other things to do. Deadlines are deadlines and even self-imposed ones must stand or the whole system falls apart.

So even though I was feeling tired and burned out and my Muse wasn't speaking to me, I kept opening up my WIP every day and pounding away at it. The words came with painful slowness, needing to be dragged kicking and screaming out of my imagination and forced through stiff wooden fingers to grind past the keyboard and onto the page.

To say writing was difficult for the past few days would be the understatement to end all understatements.

And then, as it always does, something lovely and amazing happened. I was sitting at my laptop yesterday, at a ridiculously late hour of the night (or a ridiculously early hour of this morning, if you want to get technical) because I was still several thousand words away from my goal for the day, when my Muse snuck back into the room.

She stuck her arm through the doorway, waving a white flag fashioned out of either a crumpled paper napkin or an Armani handkerchief. (I'm not sure which as I was tired and getting a little bleary-eyed.) She even offered to bring me a caffeinated beverage if I would just let her play with the familiars again for a few hours.

Two hours later, my word count goal for the day was met by over one thousand words and now the last few chapters of the book are sitting right on the edge of my brain, just waiting for me to let them fly out onto the page.

The morale of the story? Even when your brain is 'sploded and you feel like you couldn't string together a coherent sentence to save your life, keep writing. Write your way through it. It's the only way to get past it.

Or, as Kalayna says, the Muse comes to those waiting at the keyboard.