My e-book on time management is now complete, or at least, moved into the category of “done is better than perfect,” which I might ask people to write on my tombstone or whatever you get when you wish to be cremated. So I am diving back into my historical novel after taking several months off.

At a writer’s retreat recently, our fearless leader asked us to state where we were in the process. If I were a cartoon character, my eyebrows would have hopped off my forehead. There is no right answer for that question for my novel right now. So much has been written and rewritten already over the past five years. Scrivener tells me it’s over 100,000 words, which is the longest novel I’ve ever written, though still short by other writers’ standards. Yet done, even “done is better than perfect,” still lingers somewhere in the horizon.

So how to dive back in? Other than committing to work on the novel first thing every day from now on and aiming to clock in 1-2 hours of effort, I wasn’t sure what to do. So I started surfing through the novel’s file on Scrivener to see what might tempt me. Before I knew it, I was sorting and reordering ideas and notes into existing scenes, and then dove into a major reworking of my task list for the novel. Does this count as writing? For today, yes. Tomorrow I will begin working scene by scene to begin making the changes assigned to each of them. Usually if I narrow my focus to just one scene, I can begin writing or revising. I hope.

Cross your fingers that I move smoothly from goal-setting to goal-implementing.