1. Eagerly begin the week with a page quota for each night, certain you’ll have the story ready to send to your editor by the weekend.

2. Get even more excited as you read all the way through page 100 making very few changes and realize this manuscript is pretty damn good.  Picture the enticing blurb and awesome cover.

3. Feel the first pangs of discouragement when you reach the inevitable point in the middle where you’ve placed a scene that is contrived, boring, and does nothing to advance the plot–in other words, useless, and there go several hundred words.

4. Change your frown to a smile when an ingenious idea for a replacement scene strikes, and it is SO much cooler than the original–plus it boosts your word count. Yay!

5. Drink an extra cup of coffee as you come across another stupid scene you’d completely forgotten about. More cutting. Ouch.

6. Breathe easy for a few minutes while two chapters of kick-ass climactic scenes pass.  Then get all the way to the last chapter and discover that something really, really, really important to the final scene doesn’t make sense according to a plot point that happened back on page three.

7. Throw something.

8. Go for a drive. Think happy thoughts. Just don’t toss your nice laptop out the driver’s side window directly in the path of a Mack truck. Return home and do some yoga, even though all the deep breathing and relaxation in the world won’t get your bleeping manuscript completed and turned in.

9. Grab a pen and paper and do some old-fashioned brainstorming until you’ve scribbled a few ideas that actually make sense.  Hey, this could work for the ending…

10.

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