I don’t know how you write (if you are a writer), I only know how my process works. I know this because I’ve been writing the same way for a very long time. Frighteningly long. Thirty years long.
My process is simple.
I see a scene and write it. I see my characters going about their lives, like they’re people. I hear their conversations. (That’s probably why I chuckle to myself every now and then. Not saying it isn’t madness.)
There is no end when I begin a story. I can’t see that far ahead.
I see a story scene by scene. (We’ve talked about this before.) It’s not until I hold a completed novel in my hands that I read it like a real story.
Now that part has changed.
Yep. It has. Used to be that I could just send the completed, mostly edited (two rounds with my editor, edited) book to my Kindle or open an ePub on my phone and then I read it like it was real.
Sometime over the last ten months that changed. When I realised I couldn’t see the entire story when I read it digitally I popped over to Draft2Digital and ordered a proof. (Ordered one with MUCH stress and bullshit from Amazon too, and now I know not to bother ever again. I’m dealing with D2D for print and not Amazon. And it’s glorious.)
Once I had the proof [Foxtrot Mike Lima] felt like a finished story. I read it with a ton of Post-it notes handy to make small notes about changes I wanted to make. Once that was done, back it went to my editor.
Not sure what changed in my brain but apparently it did. 🙂

That’s life I guess.
Funny how things change over time. What hasn’t changed is how I approach a story and how I write.
That is something that’s on my mind at the moment.
Pain Clinic last week was all about pacing to avoid pain spikes/flares. And there lies the problem.
Things I can pace without driving myself mental (or causing more pain) are few and far between.
For example, I cannot mow the lawn for ten minutes then have a break, rinse and repeat.
Why?
1. Because I’ll run out of petrol, if I leave the lawnmower running. (That means I’d have to walk to the petrol station and carry a full can home.)
2. If I turn the lawnmower off, it won’t start again.
3. It takes a good four minutes of pulling to start it anyway – and that’s fucking painful.
4. It takes an hour and a quarter to mow the lawns. Can you imagine how long it would take if I had to turn the mower off every ten minutes to rest?

Likewise, I cannot write for five-ten minutes and get anywhere. It doesn’t matter whether I use a pen and notebook or MacBook. Somedays writing long-hand works, somedays it makes McWristy ache like a motherfucker. Eventually it has to be typed into the file. Once that file is open I get whatever needs to happen done.
It takes forty minutes to dry my hair using a round brush and blowdryer. If I stopped every 5-10 minutes there would be zero point even trying to dry my hair.
It’s going to take a lot of work to find a way to make pacing work for me. It’s not like I haven’t been trying because I have.

On that note … have a good week!