"If Your Dreams Do Not Scare You...

...then they are not big enough." -Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

Jet lag kicked my butt this year. I've been flying since I was a baby, but I've never had this bad a time readjusting, even when I came back from India. It took me an entire week to get over the worst of the jet lag and I still felt exhausted this week. Then, I came down with a bad head cold and it alllllll made sense.

I've been in a fog, barely reading, writing in bits in all those extra morning hours. Good bits, but nothing close to my usual wordcount.

Look! The view from on the castle walls of Montemor-O-Velho!
Don't look at my awful bloggy timeline *distraction*

Maybe coming back from vacation to a week filled with 12hr workdays didn't help. And the fact that my usual writing time during lunch at the office kept getting interrupted by work lunch-meetings or coworkers who needed my help.

Or, maybe, just maybe--jet lag and head cold and coworkers and random exhaustion excluded--I'm coming up with excuses. Because, like jet lag, Summer Story (aka working title Evenfall) is kicking my butt.

Maybe it's a little hard and a little scary. Maybe when I sit down to work on it, there are times when the scene comes so easy that the words just flow off my fingers, but other times I sit and stare and question why I'm putting myself through writing a story that is probably not-so-marketable because, well... I put the query into critique workshop, so you'll see what I mean soon enough.

Maybe it's putting my own life through the wringer as I dive in, research, and put myself in my main character's shoes. Maybe I'm scared that I have a concept that could be amazing if done right, but I'll never be good enough to write it. Bookishly scared me at times. Dramatically, too. But this? A million times more.

What do you do when what you are writing is hard enough that it scares the writing right out of you?

Everyday Fairytale Sighting

I've been in Portugal for the past two weeks and, since my little USB broadband modem can get very frustrating at times with getting a decent signal *cries* (next year, we're looking at a portable modem,) I've been tweeting and e-mailing but even my travel Tumblr has seen little update.

BUT, to make up for it, I'm posting this picture of an abandoned house we pass on our daily walks, which I think is awesome writing inspiration:



Picture by me, house by people, greenery and sky and mountains by nature

*hugs to all!*