The unused drafting muscle

The work I'm doing now feels a lot like drafting. This chapter was always the weakest and least developed, and like I said last week I've had some breakthroughs in my thinking that necessitate some particular development. Those two things together add up to basically needing to write brand new material for this chapter apart from developing what's there. It's entire new scenes where no aspect of it has already been established.

I should be happy about being in that position, because really drafting has been the most comfortable part of the process so far, so a little bit of reliving old times would be nice. But it takes awhile to get in the groove, so I've been really shy about approaching the work. I avoided it for a few days last week.

But I did OK this morning. I was shy getting started, but I did and it did go like old times mostly. I wrote about 1600 new words in around two hours or so. That's somewhat less than average than last summer.

The environment and process was different also in that it wasn't on my porch but in my office, it's freezing out, and I'm typing on the computer instead of writing longhand. In my contemplative moments I'm staring out the window at the oil trucks trying to navigate the ice on our hilly street instead of at the birds and squirrels and waving tree branches in our back yard.

Like last summer I tried to finish up by noting what I needed to work on next so that I don't have to use too much intellectual energy on that when I get started tomorrow morning.

Unfortunately, none of this actually feels like being closer to finished. I continue to feel really nervous about how long it's taking.