I lied...and why you should know your muse.

I will NOT be over at the 1Night Stand blog today.  It got moved to Monday.  But the contest is still running to win a free copy of Taking Control over at Heather Long's blog (come talk chocolate and sex with us) and you've still got the fantastic blog over at Wendi Zwaduk's blog to comment on so...

Enjoy those and more blog hopping to come.

Till then, I figured I would talk about what I wrote yesterday.

I wrote complete crap.  It was almost four thousand words, all told, of total garbage.

I deleted the whole thing.

Yesterday the weight of the world seemed heavier than it should.  I've had a rough *cough sputter choke* August and not really allowed myself to deal with most of it emotionally.  I just chugged along, head down and shoulders tight, plowing through one problem after the next like I was a...

Plow.

None of it got me down.  I cried exactly once through all of it.  Once.  And it wasn't for any of the bad stuff.  It was when one of my crit partners read the first twelve chapters of The Were, The Witch and The Baby and said it was "magickal."  That broke me. That out of all the dogshit, something good came, broke me.

For a minute.  Then hunched shoulders again and back to plowing.

Tuesday was hard.  Wednesday...I think something shattered a little inside.  I spent the whole day just really wanting to sleep.  To go off and dream of things that had nothing to do with reality.

Nobody picked up on the fact that I was buried in a deep and overwhelming darkness yesterday.  Nobody, that is, but my crit partner.  She read my chaps from yesterday and asked if I was okay.

It showed in the work.  My voice wasn't there.  It was writing and it was passable but it was hollow and it was empty and...

I didn't realize it showed.  I thought I could do what I usually do and bury how I felt in the work.  In this case, for the very perceptive, it was screaming off the page.

(Note:  That the same crit partner said my voice is normally ebullient was a thrill.  Oh, flattery.  It will get you everywhere especially if you toss around words like ebullient.)

This morning, I deleted most of what I wrote yesterday.  Rereading it, I could see the hollow ring to the words and how it wasn't me.

The point of all this oversharing is two-fold.

First off, don't be afraid to delete.  I stole a picture off the fantastic Kelli Collin's facebook that said in large print, Editing.  In smaller print it said something like, "Making your contribution to literature."  The image?  A finger poised over the delete button.  Sometimes, everyone writes crap.  Shit happens.  *snerk*

Know your muse...Sometimes, she is screaming for a break.

Second, although writing can be crazy cathartic and cleanse your soul in a way nothing else can...sometimes it isn't.  Sometimes you are gonna have a day where you are just better off NOT writing.  Yesterday was one of those days for me.  I refused to take the day off (Take the day off. *snort* Who DOES that?) and because of it, I wasted my time.  I probably wasted my crit partner's time because I wrote crap.  Everyone would have still had that time if I just listened to my gut, put on my shoes and gathered my kids and went for a walk rather than working.  We could have had a picnic.  We could have done lots of soul cleansing stuff.

Instead, I sat, drowned in my darkness and tried to be a blockhead and work through it.

Some days, you can't.

Know your muse.  If she is screaming that she is done--that too much has happened and she is drowning--give her the day off.  

Happy Writing!