Except….it wasn’t. It was quiet, for sure. My thoughts were rolling around in my head, and I was reading and editing and then I wanted to explore a tangent and started to type and all I could hear was KLUNK KLUNK KLUNKETY KLUNK KLUNK KLUNK. My keyboard is SO LOUD. And I type fast. And a lot (I’m quite verbose, once I get going) and so all I could think was someone coming up behind me going, ‘what are you working on?’  I always feel guilty if I have to close out what I’m doing when my boss comes out of his office. That is a sign that I shouldn’t be doing whatever I’m doing. For sure, I couldn’t look up at them and say, “well, it’s another installment of my fanfiction series, it’s a romance and my main character is meeting his love interest’s family for the first time, and it’s really awkward because……….” Yeah, so no. I didn’t want to get caught.

So I had to close the page and pretend to work, which is harder than actual working. And, of course, because I couldn’t write, I had all these ideas of things I wanted to bring out, some I wanted to tone down, conversations I wanted them to have. Need to punch up the emotion here, add more descriptive terms there…. but I COULDN’T.

It was like having to ……. use the facilites but you CAN’T. Have to hold it in, until you get home. Drove. me. Mad.

So, I left early. I wasn’t working anyway and it was Friday and no one cared. I checked out and went straight home and went straight to the laptop, ripped Word open and aaaaahhhhhhhhh. Relief.

After a couple of breaks, actually got to a point where the bare bones of the chapter is complete! \o/ I usually just spit out what I can and go back and edit. Someone, I think Stephen King in On Writing maybe (???), said “anyone can write. The magic is in the editing.” For me, that’s true. I can spit out some of the world’s most droll, boring stuff. I’m kind of amazed at myself when I read the finished product. It’s nothing like my rough draft.

Maybe the magic for me was knowing what I want to do and not being able to actually physically be able to do it. It made me long for it, wish I could, imagine myself doing it, until I just wanted to scream, and when I finally could, it was like a dam burst. Sweet. Perhaps the next time I really want to write, I should deny myself until it drives me out of my mind!

So, today is working through the rough draft. I’ve already edited the hizzy out of the first part of it, so I hope I don’t want to make too many more changes. And then it’s time to send it off to critique, more editing, more critiquing, and then archive that puppy and move on to something else.

On with the day!