A Few Days Off From Writing…

I’m too tired to write.

It’s been a craptastic™ week so far with me getting up way to early and going to bed far later than is actually good for me, and spending a lot of time on the road (over 500 miles in the last few days). I’m just a tad stressed.

My brain is fried. (I can feel it taking way longer than it should for me to hammer this out…)

Fiction, tonight, is not going to happen.

That’s a hard statement for me to type. I try to write fiction every day. Daily writing is a good method for keeping in the groove. If I let a few days pass without writing — for any reason — I sometimes have a hard time pushing past the inertia to get the words to flow again.

I keep a little spreadsheet (okay, it’s kind of a big spreadsheet) where I record the statistics of my writing. I despise typing in a big fat ZERO on any day of the week (because, let’s face it, once I do, it populates through about a dozen columns of tallies and percentages and MOCKS me). It’s a fabulous motivational tool, but the flip side, of course, is the letdown. I don’t like to let myself down.

But I knew heading into this week that fatigue was going to play a major role. Making my (self-imposed) word-count minimums would be a real struggle. After all, it’s hard to write when your brain won’t function. I’ve done it before…but it takes so much longer than when my mind is fresh.

But this week I decided to give myself a break and take a few days off, just until I can get a good night sleep, and get the mileage under control. I bought a handful of new books yesterday afternoon, and resolved to read them all. (I’ve read them all, but one, already.) And I’ve made a good dent in the knitted sock project I started. Tonight, I’m going to finish the last book, and (I hope) get to bed at a decent hour.

Tomorrow, I think, I’ll be ready to write. I caught myself daydreaming about my WIP on the long trek home from work tonight. Usually, nothing busts through the fatigue when I get like this. Maybe there’s something to be said for ignoring the taunting voice in my head.

I still have to write ZEROS on my spreadsheet…but I’ll annotate them to remind myself that time off can be just as valuable as pushing through the fatigue.