May 28th – 419094.

Well, the weather forecast was right after all, albeit twenty four hours late – this morning it rained and by the look of the ground as I got up, had been raining for a considerable part of the night too. So that put paid to gardening as an excuse for not writing, so it was time to settle down and lay down some serious wordage.

Ah, the best laid plans…

My problem today, was all about the writing itself, or should I say this particular work in progress. For me, at least once in the process of writing the first draft of a piece, I reach the point where I’m wondering if the book is actually working, if it’s going in the right direction. Will it be saleable, will it be worth reading, and even will it be editable or salvageable.

That crisis of confidence in a piece, that feeling I’m wasting my time is very debilitating. Writing becomes hard and tortuous, and sometimes, if I can’t shake the feeling, that piece is going to be consigned to the dark corner of the hard drive and left to gather metaphorical dust while I get on with something else. Sometimes those pieces never see the light of day again, usually for a good reason, but sometimes after a few days, weeks or months, they’ll resurface, I’ll see what I’d thought was wrong, probably wasn’t, and continue or correct it.

Happily today, that feeling only lasted about an hour, during which time I managed to only write a couple of hundred words and make two cups of obligatory coffee. When I’m in that kind of mood, Marion can read me well enough to stay clear and let me sort myself out, and suddenly, I did, I was writing again. Another three thousand words later, I hit 3,301 words for the day and have reluctantly put the keyboard down to do other stuff.

 Ah, the wonders of self-doubt and self-depreciation. We all have it in one degree or another, thankfully, today turned out to be only a mild attack, a mere skirmish.