Happy Anniversary?

Somewhere along the way, this blog took a terrible detour, at least on my end. From being a forum to write about writing, it's become, for me, a forum to write about complaining about NOT writing. Thus, in my shame, I have been hiding from it a little bit.

But the ms and I recently had our first anniversary, which has compelled me to come back. I'm not sure of the exact date, but roughly a year ago, I banged out the prologue to the Wedding Widow in a slow moment at work and e-mailed it to Kate D, intending it to be a little germ of an idea to take my mind off my "real" project. Well, she loved it, and a year later, the real project is lost in the cyber-graveyard of my infected old computer and the Wedding Widow is in the process of painful revision. Weaning? Teething? Some other child-rearing metaphor?

It's so hard to know what to cut and what not to. Which additional scenes would provide great color and depth to the characters and which will disrupt the novel's flow? I've edited up to about chapter 8 (of 21) in the past month. Not an output I'm happy with. But that pesky thing called "the rest of my life" insists on pestering me.

Here's the real rub. I've told myself I can back off the revisions a bit until Christmas, when I intend to have all my applications for graduate school done. But is that...okay? Oughtn't I to be writing constantly. Writers write, that's the mantra. So can a writing writer...take a month-long sabatical and still be serious, motivated and pushing forward.

All I know is my senior project is still about 8 pages too long to be my NYU writing sample. Get out the scissors