Hiatus

In these dark days of Covid 19 I have found the need to take a hiatus – twice.  I finished the rough draft manuscript of my fourth novel, The Mostly True Story of Ronan Daly, on May 24th.  I didn’t look at it again until July 10th – 47 days.  I have asked three people to serve as beta readers.  The first didn’t have any comment – sad.  The second honed in on one small detail and gave general feedback that more conflict would help.  The third made excellent developmental editing comments that I am using on a re-write of the manuscript.

I wanted to jump into editing and purchased ProWritingAid after reading many reviews of the editing software.  I was immediately frustrated because it only edits 300 words at a time.  With +77,000 words it could take a lifetime to edit.  I spent nearly $300 upgrading to the lifetime subscription to ProWritingAid.  I was able to review the entire manuscript and have a detailed report of the corrections needed.  However, it is tedious work and I haven’t had the discipline to begin the process.

On July 10th I began reading the manuscript for a developmental edit, which is the most important to me.  I read the manuscript in just two days and was disappointed.  I felt the story was vanilla and not very interesting.  I agreed completely with Beta Reader #3.  I have spent a lot of time reflecting on how I can add conflict to the story, give the protagonist something that she must have, and change the ending.  I’ve taken notes for myself but haven’t yet had the courage to open up the document and begin re-writing and I can’t figure out what’s holding me back.

The second hiatus I’ve had is from posting a blog weekly.  The well ran dry on ideas for content.  It happens.  I decided to not post in July and see what would happen to my website stats.  I decided the measure I would use is page visits.  The number of page visits dropped about 200 from the previous month but I still had about 2100 page visits in July.  The most number of visits were in March – 4490.  The number of visits varies a lot.
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The haunting question is – did the number of visits drop in July because I didn’t post a weekly blog?  I should have posited that question in my mind before beginning the experiment – but I didn’t.  The honest answer is I don’t know.  My right brain begs for a causal relationship but can’t prove it. 
  
My left brain wants to be creative and expressive and not worry about how many visits my blog gets.  Taking a month off allowed me to regenerate and content ideas are flowing freely again.  I still haven’t decided how frequently I will post or if I will follow a schedule like every Wednesday post.  I do know I need to express myself but the details of how often to post or to have a schedule I’ve decided not to worry about – at least for now.
So, dear readers, have you taken a hiatus?