I was doing so well for quite a long time at keeping up word counts each and every day, making good steady progress towards finishing my first book. That is until I reached the climax portion of this book. Then all things came to a screeching halt. I summarized and skipped one chapter. I inched my way through the next chapter. Then..nothing. I just couldn’t figure out how to continue.
Mostly, I blame it on needing a real plan for how my characters are going to get into the big prison Mara is being held in and get her out without getting caught themselves. Its a common trope – a prison break – and in quite a few books I’ve read. And I’ve always been intrigued by the methods to which the characters go about infiltrating and then escaping, usually by the seat of their pants, with their prize in tow. And well, being the absolute plotter that I am, I’d just sort of glossed over “she’ll get captured and thrown in jail, there will be a big fight, and he’ll get her out,” without ever really putting any thought into how that will go down.
I’ve been stuck here for a couple of months at least. Every few days I’d put some thought into this prison break scene and I think I’ve come up with some answers as to the how its going to happen. But now I’ve fallen out of the habit of writing, and just staring at the blank page for the next chapter is as intimidating as it was when I first started writing the book. But I’m starting to get the itch to write again so hopefully soon I’ll break through this block and get some words down on the page.
I did have an amorphous deadline to finish the book by the middle of this month – which is not going to happen, obviously. If I had been able to keep writing at the pace I’d been going, I would have done so easily. But when this big block hit, well, I just don’t have the writing chops yet to push through and keep writing. So I’ll push that deadline back. The deadline involves my first professional editor reviewing my work, but he’s willing to work with me and can push back our scheduled editing as necessary.
Even just writing this blog post is helping put me back into the mindset that my book needs me and I need to get back to it. So thank you for that!
In other news, I’ve come to a realization that I needed to change the main character’s name. She’s always been “Mariah” but I’ve never been totally sold on it. I was listening to a book that had a character named “Mara,” which reminded me of another book that had a ‘character’, or story within the story, of someone named Mara, and well, the name just sort of stuck. So, for now, I’m changing Mariah to Mara. And I feel like it fits the world a bit more. So everyone say hello to the new and improved Mara!
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