S.G. Browne

The last month or so I’ve been doing rewrites on my third book, the follow-up to Fated (coming to a bookstore near you November 2). These are rewrites based on feedback from my writers group (writers’ group? writer’s group? where the hell does the apostrophe go?) that I want to finish before sending the manuscript off to my agent. And although my first self-imposed deadline has passed, my next deadline is this Wednesday.

Problem is, some of the rewrites have been like chasing a prescription drug cure – one problem solved leads to a side-effect that needs another fix that leads to another problem that calls for another fix. And so on. And so on. And so on.

(Quick non sequitur to a Faberge commercial. And yes, that’s Heather Locklear.)

Back to our regularly scheduled programming…

So this past week, I finally figured out how to fix an issue that had been troubling me, which opened a valve and let this flood of ideas and writing flood on to the page. (I know, it doesn’t work with the prescription drug analogy, but let it go. We’ve moved on.) And when I get in a writing rhythm, or as some people call it, The Zone, I tend to forget about everything else.

I forget to clean my apartment, go grocery shopping, exercise, do the dishes, run errands, answer e-mail, return phone calls, get to bed at a reasonable time, pick up dry cleaning, get my mail, and eat. I missed at least one meal a day for five days straight. Which makes it easier when I forget to do my dishes. And kind of negates the need to go grocery shopping. So at least it knocks a couple of items off my list of Things to Do.

I also forget to blog.

But with any luck, I’ll actually get the rewrites done by Wednesday and fire off the book to my agent and hope she likes it. Then maybe I can see about going to Trader Joe’s.