Thursday, April 1, 2010

Drawing a Blank

One of the reasons I love to have guests for Pet Peeve Thursdays is . . . I'm running out of peeves.  I'm not saying my life is all peaches and cream, because I certainly think we should have had that new chest freezer installed in the garage by now (ahem), and Lord knows waiting six months between paychecks (that's the publishing way) makes life hard in just about every respect . . . but aside from those two things, the top item on my agenda is finishing the current book.

It is not going well.

I'm halfway through it, according to word count, but I'm much closer to the end of the story than I need to be at this point.  And I"ll be sitting at my computer for hours trying to think of what should happen next, and am drawing a blank.

But I have a partial solution.  Yesterday I went out to the driveway, got in my car, picked up a pencil and pad and suddenly the ideas started to flow again.
What's with that?

Mind you, this is not a new solution to the old writers block trick.  I've done this hundreds of times over the years, only then I was waiting for someone at a doctor's appointment, or some other errand they were running but needed transportation.  So even though I was just sitting there looking at my garage door, the ideas started coming.  Within fifteen minutes, I'd managed to scribble down 500 words.  (That after sitting in front of my laptop for an hour with NOTHING.)

No doubt about it, I'm hitting the driver's seat this morning with pen in hand.

And what's bugging YOU today?