I’m somehow escaping the worst of the stomach flu-plague. I’ve had some nausea and a little pain, but no big whoop. Steve is not so lucky. I won’t go into detail in case you’re eating.

Last night, I found myself losing steam on this here book project. Nothing catastrophic, but I realized I was just going through the motions and no longer enjoying myself. And I was going back for way too many refills on the red wine, I suppose for the entertainment value. I did make some progress, but I fell about 1,000 words short of my goal for the day, which is about an hour’s worth of writing for me.

The next scene I need to write is juicy from a female angst standpoint. The main character gets into an argument with her crush in a bar because he’s hitting on another woman. If I wasn’t chomping at the bit to write up a dramatic scene like that, well then. Something was wrong. I put my work away and decided to stop pushing myself for the night. I needed some kind of renewal tactic.

This morning it hit me. I’d stopped using my imagination. I used to get all into my head before writing and picture everything as it was supposed to unfold and I would think of luscious nuggets of dialogue or internal monologue and scandalous bits of the scene and then I would be excited to sit down and get it on paper before I lost the spark.

My plan for today is to hit the treadmill and run for 3 miles and instead of concentrating on how much running can suck, I will think about this bar fight and how pissed off and indignant the character is and all the biting things she’ll say, and how her crush won’t really care and she’ll fly further off the handle and be all “Pay attention to meeeeeeeee!” and he still won’t, so then she has to do something dramatic. Something that will make it clear that it’s game over with this crush. Something so ridiculous and embarrassing that she will want to run home and stick her head under her pillow and say she can’t believe she just did that. I wonder what it will be ……..