Everything is Happening Perfectly - apparently!

After successfully publishing The Hen Party and seeing sales trickling in each day, I'm eager to get on with producing my fifth novel. After all, I'm an author entrepreneur now and I need to increase my stock!

I've been working on my next novel off and on for 8 months. I should have finished by now. Instead, I keep stopping and frowning and rereading and asking myself: Hang on... is this going in the right direction?

I know a couple of the characters very well by now, but I keep asking myself: are they doing enough? Is enough happening to them? I want more action. I love books that you can't put down, that you need to know what happens next. It's not enough to have well-rounded characters; there needs to be a good story too.

I've written well over the amount of words needed for a book, but they are distributed between several beginnings. 90,000 words and still not even a finished first draft. It's frustrating and very familiar. I went through this with The Hen Party. In fact I wrote a very similar post three years ago!

When this happens I get annoyed with myself. I think about all the super prolific authors out there writing multiple books a year. What's wrong with me? I think, why am I so slow?

And then I remember an affirmation in the Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway book, by Susan Jeffers.  I was reading it to cope with my fear of driving, which thankfully I'm starting to overcome, but the advice in there applies to life in general. The author concludes her book with her favourite affirmation, which is:  Everything is happening perfectly! 

She writes: "The biggest pitfall as you make your way through life is impatience. Remember that being impatient is simply a way of punishing yourself. It creates stress, dissatisfaction and fear. Whenever your Chatterbox is making you feel impatient, ask it, "What's the rush? It's all happening perfectly. Don't worry.  When I am ready to move forward I will. In the meantime, I am taking it all in and I am learning."

Sitting at my computer, fighting the afternoon drowsiness, wondering if any of those 90,000 word are going to go towards my next novel,  I tell myself Everything is happening perfectly.

To me, this means, it's okay to be stuck now because I won't always be stuck. It means I was supposed to have written all that I've written so far, even if it doesn't go into the next book. It's just part of the plan.

Everything is happening perfectly. You can't say it without feeling slightly more cheerful, slightly more optimistic about the future.  

I've just got to trust this is all part of a bigger plan.