Kristy and I are SOOO excited for our Epic Road Trip--as we have dubbed the name. When we were planning it a couple months ago, I have to admit I didn't have an opinion on it. I mean, of course I wanted to go and it sounded like a lot of fun, but there were just SO many other things in the way. I didn't have time to think much about the road trip. But now that it's getting closer, and now that I have less to think about, my energy level is slowly growing. Each day I get more and more excited, just imagining all of the great things we're going to see. Going to states I've always wanted to go to. And, we can't forget, all the cowboys we're going to see. Come on. School is taking up a lot more time than I anticipated. I think that's partially due to the fact that I do procrastinate to a degree. I always get the stuff done, but I spend a lot of time thinking about the things I need to get done, and that wastes a good amount of my free time. I either need to stop worrying about it until I sit down and do the assignments, or I need to complete the assignments sooner. Yeah...we'll see.... On a better note, I finally got my writing juices flowing. Took me a while. I was STUCK on a section, and even though I have read not to dwell on the section, to move on and come back to it later, I couldn't. It was an important part and if I had just passed it, I couldn't have moved on completely with the story. I'm iffy about moving on from a scene anyway. To me, writing any story is just that. Writing. If I'm struggling with a scene, skipping over it is not going to help me with the development of the story. It's all about the journey with writing, and if there are parts where I can't even figure out, I need to step back and take a different look at it until I figure it out. Plus, what has happened to me before when I did skip over a struggling scene, I couldn't make complete decisions in later scenes because of decisions not made before. How can you, as a writer, write a story with missing pieces? How can you describe the characters if you don't know what they have gone through? It's like opening a book in the middle and start reading from there, then skipping pages. It just doesn't work for me. The things that helped me get writing was my little niece and my notes. For the first part of the day, I didn't worry about the scene or any part of my story. I spent a lot of time with my little niece, playing board games and soccer, and just talking to her. In the late afternoon, I picked up a book and read. A lot. Then in the early evening, I looked over most of my notes, transferring some to my computer, and putting aside the printed pages I have already worked on. I used to keep all of the printed pages in the same pile, but when I put the worked-on ones aside, I realized how much work I had gotten done, and that seemed to recharge me. Not sure why. Maybe I felt like I was actually getting somewhere with the story. Whatever it was, I ended up writing until late into the night. At this point, I only want to be done before our Epic Road Trip so my good friend can look over it. Some food for thought, I've added these pictures. It's the road in front of my aunt's old farm. We won't be stopping by this place, but it does give me fond memories. And it's a road.
