Having completely dropped the ball on countless occasions and having let my liturgical calendar widgets remain hopelessly out of date, I finally got wise and put some RSS feed links in there so I won’t have to manually update the sidebar throughout the liturgical year. I am a bear of very little brain, after all, and having to manually update things bothers me. ;)

In other news, November is National Novel Writing Month and I have resumed work on my novel after a long hiatus. I’m trying something new this time. I’m trying not to overwhelm myself with thinking so much about what to write that I end up not writing anything much at all. I’m trying not to do so much research that I paralyze myself. I’m trying to remember that I said I was going to pray before writing sessions and go to Mass frequently during the week and not just on Sundays. Actually, I think I said I would go to Mass every day but that seems overwhelming now, too.

And therein lies the problem. I keep getting overwhelmed. I try to cram too much stuff into my project the way I try to stuff too many projects into my days. (I should probably mention that along with picking up my novel writing again, I also signed up for guitar, keyboard and basic accounting lessons last week. Online and at my own pace, true, but see what I mean? I am going to have to face and accept my limitations, physical and otherwise, at some point so I can finally accomplish/finish something. I’d like to publish at least one of my novels before the end of my life, you know?)

So I backed up all my Scrivener writing projects (actually, all my projects, writing, audio and what-not, are backed up in multiple places at least once daily) and started over with a new one. And this time I’m keeping it simple. I’ve kept all my research and it’s in the other Scrivener projects and in DevonThink databases when I need or want it. But I’m not pulling all that stuff into this Scrivener project while I write. Not this time. This time I’m going to push through with the story itself and not wander down interesting research paths that lead into labyrinthine blind alleys that go nowhere.

I’m allowing myself a little time to make some notes before and after writing text; but I am absolutely not allowing myself to get bogged down in endless notes with no actual story text to show for it at all at the end of the writing session. Nope. I’ve done that far too often and this time is going to be different. This time I am going to have a complete rough draft by the end of the month. It may stink to high heaven but it will be complete. Maybe not one word of it will make the cut when it’s time to revise it. But, dang it, it will be a complete draft. Or else! So there!

I have to speak to myself this way sometimes so I’ll take myself seriously and behave. Really, if I don’t complete a draft soon, I’ll have to stop calling myself a writer and just call myself a monumental fraud instead. Keep me in your prayers, if you would. I’d appreciate it. I pray for, and remember at Mass, all the folks who follow the blog or the Twitter feed, even the people who follow me with ill intent. (I pray for them the most.) Even if you only pass through without stopping long, even if you leave me a nasty comment, even if you spam the combox, I remember you in my prayers and at Mass. And the Mass is the highest form of prayer there is this side of Heaven.

Thanks for reading and God bless you if you made it this far. And if you’ve been reading the blog for a while, God bless you even more. May the Lord grant you peace and make His Face to shine upon you. Now and forever. Amen.