I woke up this morning thinking to myself, I imagine there might be someone out there who is just waiting to see if I handled myself the same way and didn’t get my words in. OR that something happened to cause me not to. lol That’s fair. I probably would do the same thing.

Yes, I got my words in. I was not naughty Kim again. I got my words written. My words. What is that? If you haven’t followed me a long time, you may not have seen my mention of it. Or you’ve forgotten. I freakin would even if I’ve followed someone a while and they didn’t mention it all the time. But then that’s my brain.

My words are 1000 a day. That’s my daily goal that I like to reach to really feel good. If I reach at least 500, I’m satisfied. Like yesterday was alllmoooost there so I was okay with that number. If I’m only getting a few hundred for days, or a week on end? Then I start to feel sucky. I question, I wonder what’s going on. If it happened similar to the last novel I wrote, Scorched Silence, then I am a little more patient with myself. I give myself grace because I wrote that book already. That’s the second version of it. The first version was a young, immature writer Kim. She was the one who took an idea and didn’t really craft it and give it her voice. It was my own take on the story, but it borrowed too much from the original idea that inspired it.

So I finally shelved it and decided I would wait. Wait until it said, “you’re ready.” Then and only then would I pull it and go over it. I was. My instinct guides me. That inner whisper within is the one I listen to. It gets louder the more it’s listened to because it knows it has an ear. Mine is getting loud enough to be a whisper. I feel this little warm pressure inside of me and I’m pulled toward something. That’s the voice. That is the one to listen to. To heed. To follow. That one? That one has a gravitational pull to your end goal. Where your soul knows . . . this is my road. This is the one which leads to a deep inner happiness that nothing else can touch.

And that is when I pulled that book.

Only trouble? It’s also a hard road. Things come easy, but not without patience, work, and struggle sometimes. That doesn’t mean misery. I got bored writing that last story. I got annoyed and I got tired. But I never hated it. I didn’t regret the decision. I didn’t hate the idea of writing. I simply was tired because I’d already written it. My little pouty inner muse was all *stomps foot* we’ve already told this one!

So the words sometimes went for days on end at a few hundred or less. Or they picked through the story. That one got grace because of that whole telling the story before. Didn’t mean that deep down I didn’t feel like, “Oh my god this is dragging. It’s never gonna get better, I’m sick of this, I’m sucky for not getting in a lot of words.”

I’ve just been at this long enough that I know we are going to have times like that. It’s not easy to sit in a room by yourself day in and day out typing away. This is why many writers end up being active on social media. lol It’s the easiest way to get out of our heads and speak to others. Some take a lot of vacations.

I don’t know a writer out there who doesn’t have some days that are harder than others. It’s only on a normal story when it ticks out for more than a few days that I finally say – break time. Not from writing, either. From everything else. I remove myself from the social sphere, I don’t go on the internet much for a good few days to a week. I silence myself here too at times. Because when it goes on for more than a few days to a week, I know that my mind is taking in too much of the out there and I need the story to devour me. I need to open that door and step through into the world. I won’t write up posts, I won’t talk about my progress, I go deep inside myself and offline. Hasn’t failed.

What I won’t do? Complain excessively. I once heard this statement that I’ve since taken on. It was something like, “If you’re not going to do anything about it, or you can’t, stop complaining.” Complain once. That’s fine. We all do. We all have a few times we’re allotted in some cases. But after that, if you’re not willing to do anything, or if you can’t change it? Shut up about it. I can whine about being cold. Fine. Now whose fault is it if I keep it up? Mine. If I can’t change it, or if I won’t? I have zero right to expose everyone around me to that sort of complaining. I don’t do any good to anyone around me continuing to bring it up over and over and over and OVER again and becoming a whiny butt. I also feel like the more we whine, the more we take that on. If I say, “I didn’t get my words,” okay that’s fine. But if I’m complaining every single day about the fact that I didn’t, and I’m constantly whining about it, then I BECOME the person who can’t get words in. And it’s only my fault if I’m continuing to complain instead of doing anything about it anyway. Nobody else can put those words into me, lol.

So that’s why you’ll see me putting on a much better front sometimes and only really go into the darker parts once the words have gotten back on track. When I start to whine about it as I may have once or twice, then you’ll have seen and noticed that oh yeah, the words kept suffering. That’s when I try to catch myself and stop after a few days or a week of that sort of thing. I back off it, I back off myself, and go . . . reality check moment. It takes effort and I fail sometimes, but I do my best to remember to check myself.

Thankfully I was good Kim last night and I posted something before 8pm, but then shut down that phone and put it away. So by 8 pm it was off, I was out of social sphere mode and into relax mode. Still had trouble falling asleep, but I woke up shortly before my alarm at 6:45 am and woke well. no sluggishness. I didn’t listen to the podcast I have been at all. Checked social media a minute, then got back off. Wasn’t able to work out though because I was trying to get some paper edits in on Birth of a Princess so I didn’t get moving until a lil later.

But I kept to my normal schedule. It helps too that today was sunny. I am always able to get moving and feel much better when it’s sunny and the weather is nice.

As for the story, I was writing through the ship, and going through the details when it hit me. There is a machine/medical unit in Under Empty Stars (in the Guardian of Life series) that Stone and Jack make a lot of mention in near the beginning of that story, and it hit me. That is another tiny tie in to the world I can do. I wasn’t very creative. I called the thing a Doc-AI. As in artificial doctor. lol I imagine somewhere in the world someone has read something like that. For me it was original, and it worked.

So I used that for where the “parents” were taking Prism’s friends. They would have to deal with the Doc-AI. Now it’s another small thing to tie in to the world overall. Since it’s not part for the major story arc, that works perfectly. I know it’s in that world so why wouldn’t they also have the same thing that Stone and Jack used? Those “people,” if you could call them that, had to have bought or made their ship in a similar area as Stone and Jack. Or parts were built in similar factories, planets, however it works. Worked out well for me.

---

Want just the blog posts?
Sign up to receive them direct to your inbox.