Let’s just say…it’s going. 

I was doing so well, words just pouring from my fingers, then it happened: I began to question my plot. My premise. My characters. And the characters stopped doing things. I found myself writing a scene so boring, I fell asleep. 

Which then led to self-doubt. That isn’t hard; it’s always just under the surface, waiting for a moment of weakness when it can spring forth and attack. So today I’ve been jerking around, “researching”, falling into my old bad habit of deciding to learn how to be a better writer before I write.

Because *that* works so well.

Not for the first time, I found myself wishing I’d chosen an alternate career path. Or perhaps that I’d focused on writing more in my college days, rather than on the biology curriculum that led me, ultimately, nowhere. But no, I was too good for that; I’d taken AP English in High School and that was all the writing I would need, as a scientist, thank you very much. Screw the creative writing classes. Who needed them? Not I.

And thus I now find myself knowing the mechanics of grammar and with a vast vocabulary on which to draw and yet no idea how to put words together in an alluring way.

Although I do know how. Kind of. I’ve done it before. I can do it again. So what if this first draft sucks? That’s what NaNo is all about. 

I just read this post by Chuck Wendig and highly recommend it.

Permission to suck, granted.