If I’m counting correctly (and it’s possible I’m not), this is my 40^th blog entry. I’m happy to say that this site has become a more consistent, and therefore more successful, endeavour than I anticipated. Thanks to everyone who’s been following along and offering encouragement.

I wish this milestone found me with more exciting news to share, but my victories are small, as they were last week. I made it to both of my writing meetings this week, and submitted my feedback on time. I pushed myself to do some social things I was struggling with. I went to the gym once.

I’m finding that my creative energy is still effectively non-existent. I have ideas of what I need and want to do with my novel, but the energy to actually get to it is just not there. Finding new ideas is even harder. I barely got started on writing this entry. A complete lack of inspiration had me fretting on the couch that this was finally going to be the week that broke my streak. This started a spiral of being anxious that I was going to lose my streak, but the anxiety making it even harder to think of something to write to save said streak.

In a conscious act of will to disrupt the anxiety spiral, I made myself sit down and open a blank Word doc so I could tell myself I’d at least *tried* to write something. Very boringly, I name all my blog docs as “Blog X”, where X is, of course, the number of the entry. That’s how I realized this was #40, so I used that as my starting point.

Being the pantser that I am (see https://erintellslies.com/2023/02/26/making-it-up-as-i-go/ for an explanation), that starting point is key. Once I have one sentence, I can usually find another, because a lack of things to say is never the issue. The problem is always lack of energy, or lack of mental clarity, or lack of a starting point. One simple sentence to begin with and now my brain has provided me with 340 words and counting.

That gives me an idea. I’m dead serious, this idea has come literally as I was typing the last paragraph. You’re watching my brain work in almost-real-time. I keep telling myself to sit down and just do one chapter of editing, or do one hour. Just one, how hard could that be? Apparently, that has been too hard.

New plan: One sentence.

That’s the deal, brain. We open the novel, we go to the next chapter we have to work on and pick one sentence. We fix it. If that’s all we’ve got, then ok, I’ll accept that. Better one than none. I’m not even going to force it on you today, brain. We’ll sleep on it and let you get used to the idea. Then tomorrow, we edit one sentence.

I’ll let you guys know how it goes.