I had another writing day where I wrote over 2500 words, proving the first one wasn't a fluke.
If I had my doubts about working from an outline, they are rapidly fading.
It's really great to feel a story unfolding from my brain to my fingers again. It's great to feel excited about it. Right now, it feels like an interesting story that people will want to read. Hopefully I'm right.
Time will tell and this is the part where I'm cautioning myself. My first original novel did not explode on the world like fireworks. That's okay and I still intend to work on it. But I cannot let myself get so caught up in my own excitement that it crushes me to hear the genuinely constructive criticism.
Another counter-intuitive strategy I'm pursuing is to avoid reading the writing magazine I subscribe to. It sounds like a bad thing to not have the knowledge, especially since it's aimed specifically at my genre. But I find myself feeling discouraged and disheartened after reading it. So many of the articles are cautionary that I find myself wondering if there's really any point in trying. So while the information is useful, I'll leave it alone while I'm writing and then catch up on them later.
Not watching a lot of TV is helping too. I ended up missing the finale and final episodes of So You Think You Can Dance although I did look up the winners. (Congratulations Eliana, you deserved it!) Some is good, to keep me creatively engaged. (I'll watch and then think what I would have done differently with the story or try to understand why the story worked or why it didn't.) I think I'm striking a balance.
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