Struggling With Lights

Tuesday, July 3, 2018

Written by Kodi Wolf at 2:36 PM

June started off awesome. I wrote over 11,000 words in the first 8 days. Then I kind of crashed and burned the rest of the month.

My total word count for June was 17,405, which averages out to 580 words per day. My lowest words per day was 94 and my highest was 4,268.

So I think I figured out what happened.

For one thing, I'm dealing with more medical stuff, which is always stressful and seems to be a little moreso since I really haven't had a break since the beginning of the year.

I've also realized I've gotten out of the habit of writing for characters that have a main plot besides the relationship.

I've been writing scenes for A Bondage Primer for the past couple years and I've gotten used to writing for two characters who genuinely love each other and want to be together. There's very little background drama. It's all about them working out their relationship. It's mostly dialogue and sex scenes or cuddling scenes.

Then I started trying to write Lights of Life and kept struggling with each and every sentence. I had to show Jess and Kaylee doing things that are relevant to the plot rather than each other. I'm also dealing with two people who haven't come right out and said they're attracted to each other, and one of them is actively fighting that attraction.

So basically, writing their scenes was stressing me out. :)

It was also making me think the story was broken because if I'm not having a good time writing, the reader probably isn't going to have a good time reading. That idea was really undermining my confidence, which was making writing almost impossible because my inner critical editor wouldn't shut up long enough for me to be creative.

Of course, I only realized all this a few days ago, so I haven't really worked on any fixes, but I think I should be able to get back to it soon.

After looking at it more objectively, I've realized I only have a few more setup scenes to get through before I'll be able to start introducing more sexual tension into the scenes, which makes writing them a lot more fun. I also realized that while I might be taking forever to write the text, it really is only a few paragraphs here and there. And I can always come back to it later and edit where necessary. There just has to be something there for me to edit in the first place.

Which means I have to write it, even if it isn't great.