Feeling Overwhelmed...

To jump right into things, I wrote 2 1/2 pages today (so far). Am I feeling glad or even satisfied? Nope. I'm feeling, perhaps overexpectantly, that I should have 5, 10, even 15 pages a day. After all, this is what I'm supposed to be doing every day in lieu of a job at the moment. And it's not like I'm writing from scratch, I'm revising, right? Well, sort of.

The last 2 chapters I brought to my critique group were well-received, even though I felt like I rushed to finish the last few pages. I felt like I ended a chapter on a kind of cliffhanger, but more just to end it, rather than knowing where I was going with it. I had a month until my next critique meeting, so I figured I'd take care of it. One week went by, then two. Now, suddenly, I'm supposed to send my work via email sometime this week and meet next week. And I feel like I've got nothing real to read right now. I kept telling myself I needed a new outline, and then I'd know where I was going, and then I'd have fun on the ride, like the first time I wrote a draft of this story. Well, as of this morning, I still had no outline. I tried, surely, but staring at a blank screen that said "OUTLINE" at the top completely intimidated me, so I saved the document without actually entering anything else on the page. I decided I'd just write, NaNoWriMo style, and see what came out, figuring once I got going, my fingers would just fly across the keyboard and I'd have a great output, even if it wasn't great writing.

Not quite.

I guess a large part of the problem is that I feel like I should be beyond that stage, now, that I'm not supposed to be working on the "butt in chair" draft, where I just get something down on paper to get started. Right now I'm supposed to be working on the revision of that, where I hone and fine-tune and re-work what I already wrote. Well, there's a reason I haven't worked on this novel in a few years, and it's mainly that I knew it needed revision, but I didn't know what revision. And there are some things about my book that I've changed so drastically recently, I might as well be starting from scratch with some plotlines.

Some of this is impatience (I've heard that many authors-in-progress experience this); I'm tired of working on this and want to move on to the next step (for me, submission, either to an agency or publisher), and some of it is my feeling badly that it's taken me so long to put out what I feel is so little. Sure, there are authors that work on a book for 10 years, but those are sometimes 800-page historical novels, not under-200 page Young Adult books. I think I need to let go of the guilt and concentrate on the work, and enjoy the writing itself. After all, enjoying the writing is why I wanted to be doing this in the first place...