Mojo

May 22, 2010 at 10:45 am (Writing Ranting)

Yesterday I spent three writing hours literally lying down thinking.

I always feel bad when I do that, like I’m not actually working – but it almost always pays off. At about 10:30 last night, I realised that not only could I solve the major problem of my NaNoNovel, but I could send it off. Today.

And this morning, I woke up brim-ful of mojo.

Side note: I read a story about a man who needed to climb over a fence to get something he wanted. Unfortunately, there was a vicious dog on the other side. But the thing he wanted was important enough to take the risk, so he needed to overcome his fear. So he threw his hat over the fence. That way, he had to climb the fence to get his hat. Every time I mention online that I’m going to do something, I’m throwing my hat over the fence – now I HAVE to do it. It works wonders for me.

Remember how Publisher E said they’d actually not been able to open the “Waking Dead Mountain” document, way back last year? They’re not accepting manuscipts at the moment, but by way of apology they said I coudl resend it if I wanted. But I wanted to send that book to the Publisher A competition – which I did. But my NaNoNovel has been edited up to chapter 5 – and Publisher E only looks at the first three chapters to start off with. So I’ll “throw my hat over the fence” and send them that much. Then all I have to do is fix the rest before they reply.

Since I wrote the NaNoNovel more recently, it has more action in it (a lot of people have said I need more action in ym books), so it’s quite likely they’ll prefer it anyway. I’ll make sure I say so in the email.

In other news, my absolute favourite quote of the day is from Donald Miller’s blog: “In other words, if you were the person God designed you to be, you’d be in an insane asylum singing Third Day songs only wearing a keytar.”

Although it’s not at all the point he was making, I like to feel that as a crazy person, I’m closer to that picture than most.