In my phlegm era

A friend asked me, as I was gearing up to take this time to focus on my writing career, if I was concerned I would be able to stay focused. My response was that I was pretty sure the opposite would be true — that I wouldn’t do a good enough job of letting myself rest.

In week 2 of my stint as a full-time writer, I hit a pretty hard wall in the form of a persistent sore throat and fatigue. The last two days have been relatively better—the evil has begun to leave my body in the form of a fun amount of phlegm—but it still slowed down my momentum for a few days.

For the first time in this journey, I allowed myself to take some time to recover. I was still working on the book and social media posts for hours every day, but I made time for a few naps, a bath, reading a book, a couple of snowy walks with friends. It was frustrating feeling like I couldn’t focus, though. That coupled with seasonal depression made parts of this week a little tough.

BUT — I am making good progress and am currently doing the final sweep of edits on Firebug. I’m reading it out loud to myself so I can catch where the rhythm is off, if I use words repetitively, or if there are any typos. At one point I went back to reference the first draft of Firebug — started over 10 years ago at this point — and it was 340K words (about 1,000 pages). The current draft is 99K words, and stands to be even less when I’m done with this final editing run through. Between the first draft and this one, entire characters and subplots have been chopped out, but my shitty first draft served its purpose — it got me to the much better and leaner draft I’m working on today.

Here’s hoping my phlegm era is coming to a close and I will have more energy and focus for week 3!