the importance of breaks

So it turns out that sometimes it's good to take a couple of days off writing.

Last week I was all "okay, finished my novel, now I've gotta work on other stuff. Short stories. New novel." Which is good, to try to start other projects, but none of them were quite where I wanted them to be and none of them were quite working out. So my enthusiasm for that sort of trickled away. This weekend there were a couple of days where I didn't put any new fiction words on the page at all.

Instead, I wrote meta-writing posts. I taught myself the basics of Javascript, and tried to figure out how to do what I wanted to do with it. (Turns out it won't work, at least with my current skill level.) I lazed around. I read other people's fiction. I watched TV. I did nothing on the Internet. I checked my college's website dozens of times just to make sure they hadn't put up our room assignments yet. (They haven't.)

This morning I was thinking about a couple of story elements that had come up in my mind, how I could combine them, and remembered a story-nugget idea I'd had over Fourth of July weekend. I started to think through it again, but it seemed pretty straightforward. Without actually typing, I went through how the story would begin. I got to a certain point, and I had one of those "Oh." moments. Like, of course this is what the story's really about.

So I have a working title and 900 words of a short story, as well as a playlist for the story. (I do playlists for almost all my stories now. The making of it helps me figure out what kind of story it is, and playing it while I'm writing helps me stay on task.)

And now I think I am going to go out and ride my bike around for a while. Then maybe I will make myself useful and do some slush.