I’m BAAACK.
I’m BAAACK in the saddle again.
(If you lived inside my head, you’d probably be plugging your ears right about now because this song – complete with Steven Tyler’s yowls – has been playing on loop for the past two weeks.)
It’s not because I heard it on the radio or because everyone on this season of Idol is singing Aerosmith. It’s because I am, in fact, back in the saddle again. The literary saddle, that is.
After several months of procrastination and avoidance, I finally forced myself to sit down, open my manuscript and pick up where I left off. In hindsight, jumping back in was much easier than I had built it up in my mind. And after re-reading the first chapter of my WIP (work-in-progress), I even found myself saying, “Hey! This isn’t half bad!”
In the two weeks that followed, I found myself falling in love with my project all over again…and remembering why I wanted to write this book in the first place.
The best part is, after months of being away, I feel like I’m looking at my manuscript with new eyes. I’m discovering aspects of my characters that I wasn’t able to access in my first draft. The conflict has more layers this time around. And I have newfound confidence in the plot (thanks, in big part, to my editor, Marlene Adelstein, who continues to serve as a terrific sounding board and source of motivation).
