“Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” — Pablo Picasso

We’ve reached the end of the first week. Are you still surviving? Have you hit a point where you’re looking at the mountain of words that are still to write and thinking, “Who am I kidding?”

Been there, done that. For every project I do, there comes that moment when I feel I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. I’ve got a project I’m working on in parallel with my Nano project that makes me feel that way right now. It’s become a slog, and there are moments when I don’t know how I can finish it. Ironically, it’s a story that isn’t being written in my usual pantsing manner; the outline for this came to me in a flash of inspiration, but now it feels bogged down. I still remember that glorious moment, though, when everything fell into place and the outline was dashed out in a manner of minutes. As difficult as it is putting the finished product together (Holmes pastiches do not appear to be my style after all), it is a work with life, movement, and something I’m going to be proud of when I’m done, even if only a few people will ever see it.

I’ve had ideas a plenty in my time, an entire notebook of them. Some I realized weren’t fleshed out enough or didn’t actually encompass an idea I was interested in telling. Others, though, never got off the ground because while I thought, “Cool idea”, I wasn’t actually working at the time. The idea went into the notebook, never to be seen again. Julia Cameron in “The Artist’s Way” says that one of the Rules of the Road is that you must show up at the page every day. As hard as that seems sometimes, it’s very, very true.