Joshua Lobdell's Blog: Musings by Joshua - Posts Tagged "writing"

My agent constantly tells me that writers have to write. Mostly I see that as him wanting to make his 8%...but deep down I know he is speaking the truth.

Over the last two months I have kind of gotten out of habit with writing everyday. Somewhere around the first of November I took a break from my writing project because it was really affecting my mood.

Writing a book about your ex girlfriend isn't exactly on the path of mental wellness. After I got the first draft completed I needed to take a break from it...because it was really bumming me out.

It wouldn't be a story worth telling if that wasn't the case...but surviving the writing process has been tough.

Ernest Hemmingway said the first draft of anything is shit...and that is kind of how I feel about this book right now. I had a few ghost readers go over it and some of the news is encouraging but overall the story needs to be polished...a lot.

So for now I am back on the chapter a day plan. This time starting at the end and working my way backwards...because the ending to me needs the most work.

This is essentially the third pass through my novel...book...whatever fancy term we should use to describe it...it is gonna come in at 80,000 words or so and I don't know what that makes it. This is the first work I have written of that length and that has been a challenge in of itself.

I wrote the first draft and then made another pass through it. This pass is being done with notes from Ghost Readers. What I am mostly worried about is flow and story structure. Then it can go to the editors and they can rip apart the grammar and language and what not.

This is the toughest write of my entire career. Length aside the path to being a happy healthy human being is hardly writing a book about an ex girlfriend...and with that being said it is a story I want to tell...mostly because of how many people in the last three years have asked me what the deal was with her.

The hardest part for me right now is tapping into feelings that simply are not there anymore. I don't think anyone wants to read a book about some chick...and for me at times it is hard to remember how much I loved her and how special she was to me...cause now she is just some chick...saying that makes me sad cause for the last three years I thought she was anything but.

It is kind weird what things we get use to, what we take for granted, and what we do when we find ourselves without those things.

For the last four years or so I have had a muse...that one special girl who inspired me to write, or who I was trying to impress with my writing. This was actually two different somebodies...one day last fall I woke up and both of them were gone. I didn't think it was a big deal at the time because I had just finished draft one of my first book...of course at some point I was going to have to write draft two and hopefully down the road their will be other books to write and projects to immerse myself in.

Without my muses, without having the feeling of needing to impress some female...my attitude about writing really suffered. While writers tend to have crippling self doubt and what not this was something else...something I did not know how to deal with.

I don't write to make money. I write to not go crazy, and hopefully my agent of business manager find a way for those efforts to turn a profit for all of us. So of course while I felt like my inspiration was gone, and I didn't have a muse...a lot of thoughts started stacking up in my brain and they had no where to go.

That is very bad. Just all around bad...no new things for my team to market, no getting things out of my head for my own mental well being and the depression that follows those two very sad facts.

So I decided to read, and to dive head first into the world of Star Wars books...and low and behold I feel inspired again. Of course that may not last, but maybe it will and my agent can get off my back about my work rate.

It just feels good to feel inspired again, and to not have to depend on anyone else for that inspiration.