But ya’ll already knew that, right?

My original plan for the year involved working on material already generated in some aspects. I was going to spend at least the first three months of the year merely rewriting.

The good news is that I recognized fairly early that this was a bad idea. Within three days finishing “Hell For The Holidays” I started getting twitchy that there was no new material on the horizon. I told myself to stick with the plan, though. I do want to get those novels out, I do think the work I’m doing is good work and worth the time and effort.

I also noticed that I was starting to get depressed. I told myself that it would be okay–I just needed to get into the rewrite.

In the past that advice worked. I was able to sink deeply enough into the rewrites that it scratched the writing itch.

However, my writing itch is no longer the same. A mere rewrite isn’t good enough. So I decided to spend this weekend writing a short story (the next in the Hell series.) Then I’d work on the novel all week, and the short story again next weekend.

Then I heard about a call for submissions to an anthology. Tonight I wrote an ~3000 short story to meet that call.

I cannot describe how good I feel. There’s nothing like this high. I needed this hit so badly. Make no mistake. Writing changes the chemicals in my brain. This was a hit. And I needed it.

So now it’s time to revise the plan again. Because while I’m an idiot, I’m not that much of an idiot. Right now I’m aiming at a couple short stories a month, taking the time to binge write in between rewrites.

And this is merely one of the blessings that doing the Baker’s Dozen challenge has given me–the sure knowledge that I can just sit down and write a short story in a day or a weekend. This is one step further away from “Writing As Event”–which is what having a strict writing time/schedule is for me. Instead, it’s just writing, when I can, when I want to, when I need to.

And hopefully be less of an idiot about it in the future.