I’m in the zone.
I can feel it. It’s a nice place.
The zone feels like one day at a time. One scene at a time. One word at a time. The zone is in the present. It’s not worried about the future or the past. It’s focused. It’s calm. It doesn’t slide too high or too low. It’s even-keeled.
Even yesterday with my frustration over missing a writing session, I could still feel it. I just needed to put in my nighttime session and start over in the morning.
I did that today. I started over. I let go of yesterday, and I just focused on today.
I can get a lot of work done in this mental space. A LOT. And I’m looking forward to that.
All the reworking I’ve been doing with my last couple scenes is paying off. The sequence is working. I’m feeling like I’m in it. Once I get there, anyway. It’s always terrifying when I’m not there and I don’t know exactly how to reconnect. It’s not quickly or easily clear to me these days what is wrong with a scene, I just know that it’s ‘ off.’ That’s always stressful.
But…and this is huge…I’m am starting to actually trust the process, and let go of any sort of need to ‘move on.’ I suppose I’m starting to really trust myself, and my ability to know when a scene is off enough that I need to stop and fix it before moving on. When I’m in a good headspace, I don’t sit and fiddle with a scene for more than it needs. I’ve always been pretty good at moving on once something is good enough. It’s not a perfection thing.
That’s been a huge breakthrough for me: trusting the my gut feelings about working or not working are not about perfectionism for me. They truly are about a baseline level of something making logical, narrative, and emotional sense to me. And if I don’t have that baseline level, it is absolutely pointless for me to move on.
It’s a bare minimum. But, once I have that bare minimum, I can really polish something great out of it.
At the end of the day, it really feels like I’m finding my process. My real, working process.
Great day.