On day ten I did nothing toward my book for a very good reason! I had to drive over to Washington DC to teach a creative class, and it was both exhausting and fun.
One of the lovely students even purchased an original piece of artwork! Bye, art baby! Enjoy your new home!
But today I hopped back in and I made a breakthrough! As I was hand-writing a mini draft of how the story might flow, I realized a couple of things.
First, that the THEME of the story is “Work with what you have, it is enough.” The girl who is the main character is discontented at the beginning because she doesn’t have snow, a sled, or a dog to race with, but by the end she learns to be creative with and appreciate what she does have; particularly her cat, who doesn’t make a good dog, but is a very good cat!
Second, I like slipping in metaphors or parallels where I can, even for a simple kid’s story. As I was looking through her little journey, I realized it paralleled my journey with an anxiety disorder. I would be so sad that I didn’t have/know what I needed to feel better, then would hyper focus on a perceived solution that would end up crashing and leaving me feeling worse than before. I finally did learn to work with who I am now and what I can do now instead of putting expectations of perfectionism on myself, and it gave me more hope for the future and energy to take things slowly but surely (like this 100 Epic Days class!)
And that’s mine done for today! I almost wanted to write the whole script but this is how you burn yourself out and give up, Hannah so… 😅😆 That’s for tomorrow!