I cut all of my hair off a few days ago. The reflection of my nearly bald head in the mirror still confuses me, but it was time for a change. My hair had begun to brush my shoulders on the side, and most days it took an hour or two to dry after my shower. My hair was getting everywhere; little rogue swirls of it collecting under the bed to jump out and ambush my socks. I haven’t paid for a haircut in more than ten years, and was feeling too lazy to use the scissors, so out came the buzzer and off went the hair.

There are a lot of friends I don’t see that often now that I’ve quit my job. Invariably, when I do see them I am asked how the writing is going. Lately, all I can say is “up and down” while rocking my hand back and forth in the international hand signal for ‘meh’. During a three week visit to Victoria, I actually had to plug a cable into my computer when I wanted to get online, and this inconvenienced me so much that I managed to neglect this blog for the entire three weeks. For the first week back in Vancouver, I was still feeling the lag and let another week slip by. As the month drifted past without any blog posts, time spent working on my novel also trickled to a halt. Perhaps ‘sudden’ and ‘abrupt’ might serve better in place of trickled. The first few days in Victoria, I settled into the house we were looking after, eked out a quiet room to write in, and got used to the new location. After four days of sleeping in and lazing about, I sat down to write. I produced 12,000 words over the course of four days, and haven’t managed another since.

Three years ago I sat down to write my first novel. I have sordid history of not finishing personal projects, and I was going to prove to myself that I could write a novel length piece of fiction. It was a horrible story. Something I’d never have let anyone read or ever considered for publication, but it was easy to write and I was more concerned with finishing than I was with quality. I quit around the 40,000 word mark. I’d been accepted into a year long writers’ studio, and decided that I didn’t need this silly novel project to prove to myself that I was a writer, I’d be paying a few thousand dollars tuition to take care of that. The novel was abandoned and its carcass left to rot on my hard drive with the many other short story drafts that had accumulated over the years.

This current project has turned into a struggle. It was supposed to be a practice run for the project I really cared about. It was supposed to be written quickly and relatively effortlessly. It was supposed to have been done sometime last week. Instead, it sits and festers just a thousand or so words longer than my previous best effort. The temptation to move on to the next project has been strong, but I’ve been trying to convince myself that I need to finish something for once. It may be difficult, but this story needs to be finished before the next can begin.

The problem is that I’m just not happy with what I’ve done to my current work in progress. There was a good idea in there somewhere, but I lost that thread months ago. I’m officially dropping the draft and moving on to the next project. I don’t know that I’ll be able to look on this as anything but a failure until I finally manage to complete a full draft, but I guess that’s just something I’ll have to live with. I’ve managed to convince myself that it’s smarter to work this way. I’m switching to a story that’s been tugging at me for the last nine months, and it’s the idea that really pushed me to take this time off. It is the idea with the best likelihood of publication, and the one I’ve always planned to put the most revision work into. If I can finish a first draft of this story, I’ll be able to put it in a drawer while I go back to work on the last 30,000 words of the Hero project. This should give me enough distance to effectively tackle the rewrites.

Of course, at this point I can’t tell if this is sound logic or just a coping mechanism, but the truth of it all is that my free time is passing me by, and soon I’ll be back under the constraints of a work schedule. Now is my time to write, and this is the project I really want to be working on. Back to word zero it is.