Why Mother's Eat Their Young...

...and why authors shred their manuscripts. Yes, admittedly, I have been obviously MIA. The new "first" chapter of Vignette is eating my soul. My eyes are going to bleed out from staring at a white screen.

Some of you may know, Vignette never started out as a manuscript; simply something to occupy my overly-active Muse. Until, at the encouragement of several dear friends--one being a published author, I finally decided to re-write it in pursuit of publication.

Work and life both push the manuscript to the backburner at times. The luxury of spare time has eluded me these past two years, still I push onward with a sentence here, paragraph there. This isn't very helpful when one is "stuck"--not writer's block, per se, simply stuck on a section of text.

When does an author simply trash reams of carefully tended words and start over? That depends. Last night was the last straw for me on this new first chapter. It's creation was intended to eliminate a chunk of backstory from the original first chapter and I was decidely not feeling it. We are all our own worst critics at times.

Poised with the delete button under my right index finger I took a breath then stopped short. This morning I'm happy I did. Sometimes the threat of abandon pulls words from uncharted depths. Or possibly the Muse simply doesn't appreciate the smite.