mollywheezy | LJ Idol Week 6, Prompt: The path is made by walking

I had a goal of finishing writing a book before I turned 50. I didn’t make it. I have a problem with finishing things. Our dining room is surrounded by plastic tubs full of photographs and memorabilia waiting for me to put them in scrapbooks. My husband Peter says, “You don’t scrapBOOK, you just scrap. I haven’t seen a book in years.” There is another plastic tub full of cross-stitch and needlepoint projects in various stages of completion, in addition to two dressers and a closet filled with fabric waiting to be quilted. On my computer, I have two novels, three non-fiction books, and six fanfiction stories of significant length waiting to be completed. I signed up for WIP BIG BANG hoping to get at least one of the stories finished. It’s a sequel to a previous story and my beta reader has only been waiting on it for nine years. The rough draft is due tomorrow, and I’m not finished.

I generally blame my ADHD for why I can’t finish anything. I didn’t even finish the free Udemy course on time management. I have used the ADHD excuse for years, but the truth is if I don’t finish, I can’t fail. I just haven’t succeeded yet.

I was strongly encouraged to participate in the last LJ Idol, my first one, by my friend

dadi who told me she was working four jobs and writing in her third language, while I was unemployed and had no excuse. I agreed, in part because another friend suggested I journal to deal with my grief over my dad’s death. (My dad died unexpectedly in December of 2021.)

I did write quite a few entries about grieving for my dad, and about fun childhood times with my dad, until I encountered prompts that wouldn’t go in those directions, and I was able to write humor again. I never expected to make it to the top ten, but more importantly, I had twenty-one pieces of writing of which I was proud and that were finished. I had comments from numerous excellent writers and constructive criticism and new friends, including one friend

drippedonpaper who I see in real life when we realized we only live a few miles apart from each other!

I began to collect LJ Idol entries and blog posts and put them together in a book, with increased confidence to put myself out there and believing I could actually write. I completed 35, 000 words in NaNoWriMo last year, which was a record for me, and had 80, 000 words of a book, but then I made the mistake of starting to edit before completing a draft. I realized I had copied and pasted the same LJ journal entries multiple times which was significantly padding the word count, and suddenly my almost-book was not even half a book. I did keep writing, but my fiftieth birthday really snuck up on me. If I couldn’t finish writing 50,000 words in a month, I wasn’t going to write 50,000 words in three days. I gave up at that point.

Six friends died between March and May of this year. Julie, who I wrote about in earlier entries, was the sixth. The two youngest were very unexpected deaths. I’m trying to write a humor book which is very difficult when grieving. Sometimes my brain doesn’t even work. Peter and I joke “This is my brain on grief” like the commercial from the 1980’s “This is your brain on drugs.” I hadn’t touched the book in months, and then Gary announced this season of LJ Idol, and I joined to get myself writing again. Even though I took a bye on the first week, this has jumpstarted my writing and I have even worked on my book. I have not made much progress but any progress is better than none.

I didn’t finish a book before I turned 50 but maybe I can finish it while I’m 50. I have six months . . .