Kimberly Gardner

Or should I say trying to beat the damn muse into submission?

I had myself all freaked out this weekend because the story I’m currently working on, the story that’s due to the publisher in May, is just not hanging together and that scares the crap out of me.

I’ve written approximately 8,500 words of a story that should come in around 20k and I thought I had it under control. I was so sure that I did, I took time off from the project to work up a partial for another anthology.

But when I returned to the original story I found, to my horror, that I couldn’t see the story arc. True I’m a pantser and I don’t do much plotting, but I do need to be able to see where I’m going. And with this story I couldn’t do that.

So I worried and fretted and agonized and got nothing done that would bring me any closer to fixing the actual problem and this went on all weekend.

Then last night I went to a concert with my husband and some friends, an outing we had been planning for several months. And an amazing thing happened.

As I sat there in the dark listening to the band, I realized that this is my MO, the way I do all my writing. It’s nothing new.

I always have to write on the project before the story falls into place and the arc becomes clear.

When I was writing Gift Of Eros I wrote 7,500 words before the light came in my head and I knew how the story should go. Some of those words turned out to be usable and some not so much. And before that light came on I was just as freaked as I was this weekend.

The same thing happened with my novel Phoenix Rising. Except with Phoenix I had to write the entire novel before I figured out that the story was only half of what I had originally written. With that project I ended up cutting an entire pov, reducing the role of a pov character to a secondary and focusing the story on the m/m romance.

So why should this project be any different? It shouldn’t. This is just my process and I need to learn to roll with it and not let it freak me out.