Day 10, and I am keeping up. Although to make a confession, today I spent my hour today deleting instead of writing. It's because I've moved on to a part of the story where the plotting and everything is still up in the air. I had about 25 pages of old stuff for this chapter, but having made some decisions as to where the story is headed, I had to sort out stuff that I wouldn't need anymore, and stuff I wanted to keep but needed to figure out how to incorporate still.

This is usually the point in my writing where I become deathly afraid and unsure of where to take my story, and then it languishes for a year. I suspect this is why, from college graduation until now, I've averaged a bit more than one new good chapter a year. It's a really sad pace at which to make progress on a novel. That being said, I must find a way to plow through this. Thinking is involved, yes, and planning, and plotting, but I can't let myself stop writing either. It's too easy to stop under the pretext of needing more time to think, and then suddenly half a year has passed and not a word written.

Thinking on it this afternoon, I realized that thus far, my characters have faced no great obstacles. Sure, there's the obvious one around which the story is centered, but there's nothing that throws a wrench in the works when they decide to do something. Perhaps that is why my story is languishing at this stage. Throwing obstacles in front of my characters would be a good thing to revive the pace of the story, introduce new things in interesting ways, and just keep the story going. My characters have had it too easy. But vacation is over! It's time for them to start working.