After months of writing for just ten minutes a day, I have finally managed to write a book for the first time in four years! The last draft I finished was back in 2021 when I write the Cloned Evil trilogy. It’s been so good to finally feel somewhat normal again.
It has been an adjustment to writing like this. I used to churn out a first draft in a week, letting myself get completely lost in the story and working off of a plot outline. I tried a lot harder with that first draft, hoping that it was structurally sound and actually including all of the bits that I don’t really enjoy writing. It was easier to do because I was writing for hours at a time, which meant that I would get back to the fun stuff soon enough.
But with only ten minutes a day, a lot of this went out the window and I went back to how I used to write. No plot, no time spent on the boring stuff, a lot of skimming over the bits that I didn’t have fully figured out. I forgot how much fun pantsing is. Plus, it’s not like I only spent ten minutes on the story a day, just ten minutes writing. I would write at the very end of the day, and then go to sleep with story ideas spinning through my head.
Which, incidentally, means I slept a lot better when I wrote.
There has been nothing that’s made me feel more like myself in the last several years of being chronically ill than finishing a book. It will be a long time before it’s ready for anyone else to read, but I’m so excited to be able to get back to working on the things I love again.