Process is not the book. 

That can get lost.

The idea, not the book.

If your approach to writing works, results in the successful completion of multiple novels, it can become easy to think that the process you employ is the only route to that result.

Face it, if you traverse hostile territory in safety once, you will be inclined to use the same path every time you have to cross that ground.

That’s a bit breathless and overstated, but anyone who’s tried to write a novel, and that’s far more people than will ever admit it, knows just how daunting the fuckers are once you’re in the middle. Putting your foot on the path is one thing, anyone can start a journey of any distance by taking a single step, but the further you get from that point, the greater your commitment becomes.

But say you get all the way across. After any number of nausea inducing moments of fear (”What the fuck have I gotten myself into for fuck sake,” is a frequent refrain on this trail,) you arrive on the other side with a complete novel in hand. Which serves as a free and safe ticket back home.

But there you are, home again. With an itch. To wander again.

Well you know the route now.

And the easy and safe thing is to try it once more. See if it’s still open.

And a rut is so easy to wear.

it’s not the worst thing in life, having a safe and comfortable path. Especially if it’s scenic and has fun bits. Not the worst thing to have a reliable process that gets you where you want to be.

Fuck, we should all be so fucking lucky.

But the deeper you wear that rut the harder it will be to climb out and find a new route. Turn to that process once too often, and you’ll begin to mistake the formula written in it for the book itself. One cannot be without the other.

And of course that’s not the case.

My process has been blown to hell.

In part this was by design. I set out to write three books that would let me try new things. The Shotgun Rule was the first, Mystic Arts was the second, and I’m in the final stages of editing the third. In between these side journeys, I took strolls one of my favorite paths, the one that leads to a Joe Pitt book.

But now I’ve been knocked off that path.

In the past I’d turn in a new Pitt book before the previous book in the series had even published. I’d rarely have more than six months between the writing of those books. And they were completed in a similar time frame.

Different now.

Because I switched up my own process and wrote some books that took longer than most of my past work, and because of a change to my publishing schedule, I didn’t start Pitt V until after Pitt IV had published.

I’m writing it now. Well after the point I’d normally expect to be done with the thing.

I can see the old path from here, but I’m on a new course, one that requires a great deal of hacking, one that often takes me into gullies and defiles that cause me to lose sight of the old track.

used to be, I’d follow one path while casually mapping another, for the next trip.

With the late start, new projects are now overlapping.

I have to leave the path on occasion to plant a marker, cut a bramble, clear way for what’s coming just behind.

But the road is not the destination.

And process is not the book.

And I’m not lost, but there’s little time to write home.

-c