Slow progress

Normally, I'm a deadline ninja. I love deadlines, I can work out how much I have to do each day and get ahead, and have a sense of the scale of it all. 'Write a book, 100k words' sounds impossible, sounds ridiculous. But then you chop it into little deadlines, and it all makes sense. So I chopped the rest of the first draft into bite sized chunks and, writing one thousand words a day, it will just be finished by the beginning of December. I don;t have a real plan, but I do have a list of things that have to happen before other things happen, so I should be writing away on plan, and a couple of days ahead.

But I'm not. After all the waiting over the summer, I'm stuck again, struggling to think of words, find plot lines, or enjoy the process of writing, which is normally automatic. I'm distracted by escaping chickens, arguing kids, whining cats (mostly because I haven't lit the woodburner and it's raining), and lack of sleep. I was up before six this morning, unable to get back to sleep, and the house is so cold and dark now, in the mornings, and it's so long before anyone else has to get up. I did manage to read a bit, at least, and I did write a bit, but I'm short on ideas. I seem to be stuck in a loop where my creativity is being used up by the need to create excuses for why I'm not working.