Hello, friends!  Welcome to this month’s meeting of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group, a blog hop created by Alex J. Cavanaugh and co-hosted this month by PJ Colando, Kim Lajevardi, Gwen Gardner, Pat Garcia, and Natalie Aguirre.  To learn more about this group and to see a list of participating blogs, click here!

Last month, I wrote a post about how very ready I was to get back to writing.  I had big plans.  Big hopes and dreams.  Due to circumstances beyond my control, I’d been on a bit of a creative dry spell, but as soon as those circumstances stopped being so totally out of control, I was eager to get back to writing.  And then… nothing.  My muse, it seemed, was not going to help me.

When I first started transitioning from writing as a hobby to writing as a job, I got some sage advice from a more experienced writer friend: however long you think it will take to do something, double it.  That’s how long it will actually take.  I have found that rule of thumb holds up well.  On a few occasions, I’ve taken on a project that turned out to be easier and quicker than expected.  But that’s rare.  In most cases, things really do take twice as long as I expect them to—sometimes more than twice as long.

And that rule of thumb extends to recovery time as well.  I don’t have writer’s block.  I just need rest (and my muse knows it).  So instead of writing, I’ve been recharging my creative batteries.  I’ve been re-reading favorite books and re-watching favorite movies.  I’ve been trying to reconnect with the stories that made me want to be a writer in the first place.

So recovery is taking a little longer than I expected, and that shouldn’t be a surprise.  I still have big plans.  I still have big hopes and dreams.  They’ll just have to wait a little bit longer.