​This tweet is my life, everyone.
 
I cannot tell you how many 10k manuscripts live in the graveyard that is the Documents file of my computer. There they sit, abandoned, crying out for attention. Will I ever get a second act? Whatever happened after that third major plot point? But is the MC’s brother’s cousin actually the villain after all?
 
Poor abandoned manuscripts. It was a bit of a rough writing year for me. I did a lot of editing projects and worked on some things with other writers, but my own work just kept falling flat. Every time I started something and got excited about it, that excitement died somewhere around the  8-10k mark and the poor book ended up in the graveyard of lost and loosely plotted souls on my computer.
 
This went on for about seven months. And any writer will tell you that seven months of feeling unproductive and creatively stifled makes you second-guess a lot of things. Like whether you’re cut out to write this long-term. Whether you’re good enough. Whether you’ll ever produce anything worthy of being read again.
 
Clearly I’ve had A Lot of Feelings for a while.
 
I took some time at the end of this summer and stopped trying to write anything new for a few weeks. I kept working on editing projects, but I actively stopped trying to create anything. I was worried my brain, and maybe my heart, needed a break. Some space from feeling like all I was going to do every time I sat down at the computer was create another new character who would be lost to my Google drive before they even became three-dimensional.
 
I struggled some more as I threw myself back into writing this fall, but recently things have been coming together again. I just hit 20K on a manuscript that I actively am really enjoying. I’m in that delightful stage of writing a new novel where I relish waking up every morning to write my next scene. What brought on this sudden bought of renewed creativity? I’m not sure. Maybe it was the time off. Maybe my muse and I were finally in the same room at the same time again. Maybe maybe maybe.
 
I wish writing felt more linear sometimes. I wish I could follow the trains and lines of my creative process with a better idea of where it’s going. But I can’t, and in a publishing world that’s as much of a roller coaster as the creative process, I know better than to hope for a linear existence in writing. It would be nice. But it’s not likely to happen anytime soon.
 
I teach college writing to freshman, and we talk a lot about embracing moments of struggle in the writing process. Working with them, not against them. Trusting that growth and improvement will come if you put in the work, even if it doesn’t come at the same rate as it does for the person sitting next to you.
 
So as I’m staring down the graveyard of manuscripts in my documents folder today, I’m trying to remember that each of these books were meant to die in the ashes of that folder. They have been part of my journey to improvement. They are not lost weeks and months of writing, as they sometimes seem to be. They are part of everything I will ever write in the future, every word I will produce on this computer, even if they never got their own second act.
 
To all the manuscripts I’ve loved before: thank you. Forget everything I said when I was swearing about how your secondary characters were flat and your plot had no focus.
 
You’re wonderful, even though you’re terrible. 

​Sherman Alexie, who I quickly fangirled all over. As one does. It’s basically just a miracle I didn’t cry as he signed my copy of WAR DANCES.