When inspiration strikes.

#ROW80 is A Round of Words in 80 Days. It’s a quarterly writing challenge where you define your personal goals and blog each week about your progress. It’s made to be flexible and allow for tweaking.

Last week

I talked about how much I seriously love scratching things off lists and how much it motivates me. So that said, this post scares me a little.

As of my last check-in on Wednesday, I was supposed to begin writing So Inked #3, which is a contracted book with a hard due date. It’s my first deadline so I wanted to ensure I had enough time to work on it, which I did even with How the Zombies Stole Christmas running so long.

And then…. inspiration backhanded me.

That’s the best way I can think of to describe this last week.

It’s no secret that I’ve been taking part in my local Citizen’s Police Academy class. I even did a post a few weeks back about getting to shoot police issue fire arms. It’s been a great experience! I have a lot of material for So Inked #4, but I knew, I just knew I was going to have more information than I needed for that book… and the ideas would come.

Now, the class has been going on for well over two months. That it’s taken this long for inspiration to tackle me is kind of a miracle.

I started what I thought would be a good 20K novella that would fill my commitment to another proposed idea I’m tardy to the point of bailing on… and I’m clocking in right now at 25.9K. The story is not yet finished. I’m getting to use my classes on SWAT, bomb and event management to create a really exciting story. That will be way over the word limit for the project proposed.

Part of me is screaming and kicking that my schedule has been so thrown off balance that I’m going to spend the entire summer making up ground. It stinks, but I wouldn’t change a single thing that’s happened.

You know why?

Because this new book has given me a fire and a passion for telling this story that you don’t get with every book. I wake up in the morning and I burn to write. I want to get up early to write before my day job. I spend my lunch break writing. I jump right into the story as soon as I’m off work — and it’s an amazing feeling. I’m loving every minute of it, because it doesn’t happen all the time. As writers we want it to, but sometimes we’re doing the mechanical thing of putting words on paper regardless of how we feel. It’s simply refreshing to burn to write.

So here’s the new short list of ROW80 goals:

• Finish writing Christmas novella, How the Zombies Stole Christmas
• Edit How the Zombies Stole Christmas
• Get through at least one round of edits on The Harder He Falls
• Write the rough draft of Hot Tango
• Begin writing So Inked #3

What does inspiration do to your writing process?