#21 - I Don't Know What I'm Doing

I don't know what I'm doing.

There are times when I feel like a little girl all dressed up in her mom's dress with a huge necklace down to her knees, clomping around in shoes 10 sizes too big with lipstick smeared across her face.

Here I am, a 30 year old woman in her 13th year of marriage with four children, and I still feel like a child.

I look around me at all the people who seem so confident and competent and seem to have everything together, and I wonder if they feel as lost as I do.

This feeling is especially prevalent when it comes to my writing. I read so many books that leave me in awe, and then I look at my own writing and wonder who I'm kidding.

I want to write something meaningful, profound, inspiring, uplifting, or at least helpful or worthwhile in some way. I have this high-follutin dream (By the way, is high-follutin even a word? Am I misspelling it so badly that the spell checker can't even recognize it?) Anyway, I have this high-follutin dream of writing the next "great American novel", something that readers for generations will read and love. But I wonder if that's even within the realm of possibility for me. I'd say it's not, but there's this tiny voice inside me that says anything is possible.

So, that's me. In a nutshell, I feel like Jerry Seinfeld trying to pass himself off as President Hinckley. Sooner or later, everyone will see I'm a fraud.

#20 - Falling Behind

I haven't written a single word on any writing project since November 30th.

I've thought about sitting down to write often. I had a goal to try and finish my first draft of my book by the end of December.

The problem is, I'm in one of those "off" moods. The farther I got into December, the more convinced I was that everything I've ever written is worthless. I don't know why I get in these moods.

The thing that's finally broken me out of it a little bit is that I got a new story idea that I'm pretty excited about. The problem is, I absolutely refuse to start another new project until I've finished the two projects I'm in the middle of right now. It's bad enough I let myself start a new book when I was already over 80,000 words into the first one, but to start another new one would be too much.

I also realized that the more I work on these books that I don't necessarily like right now, the more practice I'll get writing and actually finishing novels, and the more practice I get, the better my next book will be.

So, I pulled out my NaNoWriMo book this afternoon, dusted it off a little bit, and actually wrote a few words. I'm excited to be back in the writing mode and I'm going to try really hard to stay here.

Another motivation I have for finishing this book is that I just paid $20 for a session to meet with an editor at a national publishing house and I want to have this book ready to show him in March. It's time to put my nose back to the grindstone.