Thursday, May 24, 2012

A Most Evil of Maladies



I suffer from a serious affliction. 

It is one that has haunted me for the past five years. It has caused me grief, frustration, forced me to miss deadlines, and at times has even made me difficult to live with. As much as I try to forget it, it rears it's ugly head from time to time so I can no longer pretend it isn't there. No matter how hard I try, I cannot escape it. It's just something I have to grit my teeth and suffer through.

You think I'm talking about my CMT? Nah, I've got that handled.

I'm talking about something that causes me even more gray hair and bouts of elevated blood pressure.

I call it Almostdoneitus

The cause of this horrible condition is unknown, but it's main symptom seems to be that the closer I get done to finishing a manuscript of any kind, the more I struggle and the slower I write. And as I approach the very end, it's like mental blocks start falling into place and I end up sitting and staring blankly at the screen or getting an uncontrollable urge to go scroll thru facebook.

I now have half a scene to go in order to finish the rough draft of my novel. It's the next to last scene of the story, and it has been giving me so much trouble that I skipped ahead and wrote the epilogue to get that out of the way. I figure it will take about three thousand words to finish that scene...something I could usually crank out in a day. But since this is all that's left, I wouldn't count on that.

Sigh.

Somebody needs to come up with a vaccine, because I hate this stuff.


2 comments:

  1. Yikes, that's a terrible case of the disorder! Maybe if you promised the muse a sequel, she'd let you finish this one :).

    Assuming anyone's alive for a sequel :)

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  2. Yeah, it's a real pain. My muse has ADD and tends to wander off at the worst times. I'm writing the final showdown between two of the characters and the most fearsome of the monsters right now. Fight scenes can be tricky. In this case, i'm slowing things down to blow by blow to try and maintain tension, so I have to keep an eye towards pacing too.

    This book is like my other novel in that it is designed to stand on its own, but there are several ways I could return to a sequel. I've had an idea or two for that, but I have yet a third half finished novel I need to attend to first. Then I'll look at all three of them and decide if I want to do a sequel for any of them.

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