I spent a fair amount of time at the library this weekend, which is something that I’ve been meaning to do for a while now. Not to look for books necessarily (gods know I have way too many of those), but to have a nice, quiet place to work on my writing.

If I haven’t mentioned it before, I finished the first draft of my novel, the working title being Children of Light. This will (theoretically) be the first book in a trilogy, although I haven’t completely worked out what will be happening in later books.

I have a love/hate relationship with writing. In a way, I love it. I love being a writer and talking about writing. I like blogging about writing, although I don’t do it very much. I like the idea of finishing my manuscript, of being creative, of finding ways to make it better and better.

But the actual day-to-day, sitting down and writing the darn thing? That’s the hard part. I have a really hard time doing it. My mind keeps wandering, my fingers hover over the keys. And I can usually find excuses (good ones) for skipping my writing goals for the day. I had a really bad day at work. I don’t feel well. I have to clean something (I don’t use this excuse that much, to be honest, but it’s still a good one).

It took me over a year to get the rough draft together. And believe me, it is ROUGH, especially what I wrote during NaNoWriMo last year. I haven’t looked at it much, but I know that for several chapters, I used the word “strange” a lot. Like, over and over, several times in one paragraph. Everything was strange!

I have no idea how long my first revision will take, although I finished revising through chapter 2. I’ve already changed a whole bunch of things. The entire political situation. My main character (the writing group said he was boring and passive before – well, he isn’t anymore!). A lot of things will be in a completely different order.

This is all good. It’s all progress. But it’s also extremely daunting. I still wonder whether I am up for this. I think that’s why I read so many author blogs. It helps to know that pretty much every single author believes that their writing is terrible at one point or another, no matter how many books they’ve had published. If they can do it, so can I, right? Right?

I hope so. Cross your fingers for me!

Also, I have a shameless plug here. I’ve mentioned several times that I co-host a podcast with my friend Jess – Bibliophiles Anonymous. We’re getting ready to revamp our website and include not just podcast episodes, but also blog posts with book reviews. A lot of these will be from digital ARC’s that we get from Net Galley, which we don’t have time to include on the podcast, but don’t want to miss. So please go check it out! We will start this in the next few weeks or so.