is really hard! That’s why I’m blogging about it instead of actually working on it. It’s middle grade, and those are always really hard for me. (I say “always” as if I’ve written a lot of them. This will only be my second.) The last one I wrote took me several years–working off and on–and my YA books usually only take a few months, if that. I’d work on it, get a few k in, and then feel like I couldn’t go on and give up, only to reread it a few months later and be like, “What was I thinking? This is AWESOME!” And it’s not like it was an emotional book or anything–it was hilarious.

This one I’m working on now is also awesome. Possibly one of the most awesome projects I’ve worked on. And I keep thinking, “If it’s so good, why can’t I just get obsessed with working on it already and zoom through it?” That’s my normal MO, and it’s just not happening. It’s tough. I started this book last June, maybe? And I’ve got almost 9k. I’ve taken breaks. I haven’t given up on this one (mostly because The Spouse is in love with it and that makes me feel a little more validated), but I’ve put it aside multiple times. Sometimes to work on other projects, sometimes just because it was hard.

This month I’m doing Jano (fake Nano in January) and trying to finish it, because I really love this book and I don’t want it to take several years to hit “the end.” Last year I killed at Jano, churning out 60k and finishing up my first draft of Shades of Rome. This year… it’s slow going. I don’t get words every day. And no matter how many words I get the day before, the next day feels just as hard, like Sisyphus rolling a giant boulder up a hill. I mean, in a way that’s always how novel writing feels–you hit your word goal, feel great, and then in the morning you start over. You’re only as good as the words you’ve written TODAY. But usually if I’ve gotten words down the day before, if I get my butt in the chair the next morning, it’s not too hard to get the words flowing again.

This book? This book is slow going. And it doesn’t help that when I wrote slowly, I start to agonize. I tend to believe/feel like fast writing is better writing. So if I’m writing slowly, something must be wrong. I must be sucking or this book must not really be that cool, because if it was actually cool and if I actually loved it enough, I’d be speeding right along. But I think I have to face the facts that this book is just hard for me. With both middle grade books I’ve worked on, I’ve felt like I loved reading the end product more than I loved working on it. It’s not something I’d want to do all the time, but sometimes the right book comes along that’s worth the effort. I’m always hopeful that I’ll hit my stride and everything will fall into place and speed up, but even if I don’t? Maybe that’s okay sometimes.