One Bite at a Time

[Dana King]

Today begins my new blog, One Bite at a Time. Credit for the title goes to my beloved Spousal Equivalent, who gave me the best writing advice I ever received, and I've received a lot of good writing advice. (The doldrums in which my "career" currently resides are due entirely to my own failings; I have been singularly fortunate in getting the attention and good advice of many.)

One day a few years ago, The Spousal Equivalent caught me whining about how discouraging it was to know I had probably fifty thousand words left to write on the current project. The thirty thousand I already had on disk were of no consequence. As a writer, I'm not one of those "glass is half empty" guys; my glass is broken and the water is running onto valuable things that will be irretrievably damaged by the contact.

She recommended for me to stop looking at the enormity of the total task, and to "eat the elephant one bite at a time. Now there's rarely any more on my plate than I can accomplish in a day, or some other easily digested period of time, and I never have those slumps where I can't bear to sit down and write because I can only accomplish an infinitesimal amount of the work before me.

That's what I hope will happen at One Bite at a Time. It will be a place to work out ideas, theories, maybe even a scene or two. I hope you'll stop by and agree or disagree, and that we can all learn something from each other, a little bit at a time. With luck, I can share something that works for me and may be of use for someone else.

One Bite at a Time can be found at http://danaking.blogspot.com. I hope to see you, and your comments, over there.

[Dana King]

Thanks, Penny. She's a keeper.

[Pennybrooke]

Your Spousal Equivalent is wise! I'll be sure to keep that phrase in mind as I'm writing - I'm about 1/7 of the way through my first novel, and those 6/7 are daunting, to say the least.