I’m behind on my novel. Let me clarify that. I’m behind where I want to be on my novel–where I need to be to reasonably make my deadline. So let’s take a look at how I got here.

Despite 2020 being what it was, I had a pretty good second half of the year writing. I turned in my 4th novel, MISFITS, to my editor on time in the first week of December. I’m pretty happy with it, and though I’m sure my editor will have changes, I’m pretty confident that I understand the book well enough to do whatever he thinks it needs. So far so good, right?

That’s where things kind of fell apart. Because I chose 2020 to be the year that I worked on not one, but two books. I figured that my transition to being a full time writer meant that I could do two instead of one. And perhaps that’s true, in a perfect world. Alas, we don’t have one of those.

I did plan. For example, I planned to have October 15th to November 15th as a break, and that worked. I knew I wouldn’t get any writing done during the critical weeks of the election, so I turned my next-to-last draft of MISFITS in to my agent for her notes in early October, asking for it back on November 15th. She got it back early, which is amazing, but I still sat on it until the 15th. Again, so far, so good. I felt so smart!

All I I had to do was start writing my 5th novel, THE WEIGHT OF COMMAND, during the second half of December, just like I planned. Then came the things I couldn’t plan for (or, maybe, that I could have planned for, but didn’t).

But I couldn’t write during the holidays. I tried to. I really did. I sat down at the computer, had the documents open, and I had a plan. It wasn’t overly ambitious. I was going to write Monday through Wednesday of Christmas week, and Monday through Wednesday of the following week. Plenty of time left to spend (in a very limited, Covid fashion) with family. Plenty of time to relax. But for whatever reason, I couldn’t get it done. I think some of that was on me. I think I misjudged how much time I needed to recover from the previous book before being ready to jump in to the next one.

And maybe that sounds ridiculous. Hell, it sound ridiculous to ME, even as I write it here. I had time, I had the means, I should have done the work. But here we are. I didn’t. I couldn’t. My creative brain wasn’t working, and I couldn’t make it happen.

So I did what you have to do in that kind of situation. I forgave myself (Mostly. Okay, maybe not mostly, but some) for the lack of progress and made a new plan. I’d come back on the first Monday of the year, fresh, and get to work then.

And I did that. On Monday, January 4th, I sat down and wrote 3000 words, and on Tuesday, despite me living in Georgia and it being election day, I wrote 2000. They weren’t good. They were, truthfully, among the worst things I’ve written in a couple of years. But I got them done. Wednesday? Not so much. In my plans, I really hadn’t considered being in the swing state during a runoff election as the results came out. Thursday? I didn’t plan for people to try to overthrow the government.

How do you write when everything going on around you seems so much more important? The answer for me was: I don’t. If you came here for answers on how to be productive, I’m sorry that I let you down. Because I don’t have an answer.

To some, this might seem like a pretty simple concept. You might be reading this and saying, “Yeah. Duh.” But for me, it’s somewhat revelatory. I’ve always been a proponent of the mantra that if you wait until you’re in the right mindset to write, you’ll never write anything. My method has always been to sit down and make the words whether I wanted to or not.

As it turns out, I can’t always do that. I haven’t been able to do it for 5 or 6 weeks now.

I don’t lack for ideas. I have an outline for the book, and while it’s not going the way I want it to and I think it’s garbage right now, I’ve been that way before with books, finished the draft, and then fixed them in revision. I’ve written two completely new pitches into my book of ideas for books that I dreamed up during this same period. It’s not a lack of creativity. This is simply about not being able to focus enough to do the work.

And I’ve decided I’m okay with it. I say that now…we’ll see how I feel as the May 1st deadline approaches. But for today, I’m trying to be good with it. In the scheme of everything that’s happening right now, it’s hard to be worried about a book. Because seriously, where does ‘Mike Mammay is behind on his book’ rank on the scale of problems in the world right now?

It doesn’t.

And even with that, I question myself. I’m in a very good situation, and there will *always* be people who have it much harder than I do, so it feels self indulgent to even think about stuff like this. But in the end, regardless of my situation relative to others, I do have to focus on myself sometimes. There’s a balance in there somewhere, though given how often my mind goes back and forth on it, I don’t know that I’ve found it.

So why am I writing this? I think part of it is a reconciliation with myself. And I think part of it is that I expect other people are struggling to do things–writing, maybe, but really anything–and they’re treating themselves unkindly because of it. So maybe I’m just saying that if that’s you, you’re not the only one. Maybe cut yourself a little slack.

So what’s next? Well, I wrote this blog post. That’s something. And on Monday afternoon I’ll sit down and try to write more of my novel. We’ll see how it goes. I’m sure the world will be totally calm to help me out.