Listening to the messages

I really should listen to the messages in the air. I should pay attention to the subtle messages pounded into my head. And really, I should listen to my muse, rather than ignore her and lament her departure.

But when characters from the story appear in my dreams, not just in supporting roles, but as an active thump to the head, I have to listen.

It is so easy to sit and wallow in self-doubt, drowning out the messages and then blaming the lack of writing on writer’s block, rather than admitting the reason I am not writing is self-inflicted.

When I was hired, in a dream, earlier this week to assassinate Neil Gaiman with a chicken, I thought it was cute and funny. When I, in a dream, then sent Mr Gaiman an email about my dream and he responded, I thought it was a little odd. But when Oscar, one of the characters in my novel, looked me straight in the eyes last night while I was happily sleeping, and shook his curly black hair (briefly resembling Neil Gaiman, just to enforce the theme) and told me that they missed me, I could no longer argue. The story is the master, after all.

So, I am going to force myself to write every day again, like I used to. Even if I just write for 10 minutes every evening, and only manage 100 words, it is better than nothing. The Daily Writing Tips site gives some good advice in this article, and I think I will use some of them, at least to get me started again.

Current wordcount: 34740

Target for the week-end: 4500 (considering I have a lot of free time on Sunday)

Target for the next week (including this week-end’s 4500): 7000, which works out to an average of 500 words a day for the week days.

This should bring me to 41000 words roughly next week Friday.

[eta] I will be makign use of Twitter and the gadget in the side bar here to keep track of the word counts.