Warning: This particular post is just me bitching and whining and venting. If you are one of the lucky people I have already been doing that to, turn back now. If you are not one of those people and you want to read about how writing is turning me into a completely crazed, obsessive freak-a-zoid, please continue.

I have been working on my third–no fourth– (fifth?) attempt at completing an actual real life novel for a little over five months now. I have been so proud of myself, patting myself on the back, being a self-righteous bitch about how I haven’t really had a problem with the infamous “writer’s block” as of, yet. I have been furiously turning out page after page after page while congratulating myself on how awesome I am. (I know, I really am insufferable).

But this past weekend, while lying in a sinus headache-induced stupor and printing out chapter after chapter of this crap I realized something. It was a very big something. And, the something is that I think I should have stopped at that last writer’s block and waited it out instead of building a road around it that goes somewhere completely off course. I mean, even though my ears were ringing and my nose was leaking and my head was pounding, I was still very certain while reading that this story had taken a turn into crazy town. All the characters are off acting like assholes, not doing a damn thing I set out for them to do, while this plot is scampering around growing thicker by the minute. I know that most of you would be surprised to hear that I have characters who act like assholes, as I’m sure you were all expecting light, bubbly, sweethearts with optimism spouting from their every orifice. But, no. They are all running around, mucking everything up and leaving me wondering how in the hell they are going to get out of this mess. I’m not helping them, that’s for sure.

At this point I have enough pages for two books instead of one, and I’m waking up at 4am everyday thinking about people who only exist in my mind and in a freakishly long word document, trying to decide which scenes to delete and which to keep. Which ones are important, and which ones were only important to Malbec-Me at midnight. Hmmm… decisions, decisions. I get why God just leaves us to figure crap out for ourselves a lot. This shit is for the birds.

So, anyway I guess I’m going to fix all that over the course of the next year or so. But first, I need to procrastinate a little while longer in the form of writing this blog post and drinking wine I really shouldn’t be drinking on a Monday night. But directly after that, I’m going to attempt to figure out where in the hell this detour goes. If you know anything about me at all, you will know that I get lost a lot. I mean, not just sometimes, but an unnerving amount of times in a year. If I write at all in the same way that I follow directions, there is a good chance I will be retracing my steps a while. But, the good thing about getting lost, is I almost always find a new, better, shorter way to get where I’m going the next time.