Spinning My Wheels

I know immediately when I'm not in the mood to write. I'll dawdle ~ check out social media, play a round of a computer game, check my email that I just checked five minutes before. But a writing day is a writing day, and I don't get many of them, so eventually I plunged ahead.

Every scene is supposed to count, right? What if not all of them do? I'd somehow roped myself into having my main character go fishing (??) with her superstar mentor, who's just a good ol' girl at heart. But there was no point to it. The two of them could have had some meaningful interchange while out on the water, but that didn't happen. The closest I came to it was MC's mentor silently acknowledging, with a sympathetic pat on the knee, that the main character's heart is broken. Well, we already knew that! Maybe it just needed to be mentioned again so that her love interest doesn't fade into obscurity like all the characters from Part 1 have.

To make matters worse, I had to write the (professional) breakup scene between MC and her manager. I didn't have to, but the anticipation was kind of hanging out there and it would be disingenuous to skip past it. That scene, too, was anticlimactic. He insulted her and she rattled off a withering response in return, but all that scene really did was tie up some loose ends.

MC's mentor hooked her up with a new manager, a youngish woman who is so far pretty dull. They're driving together on a brief radio tour and just getting to know one another. The dialogue between them is pretty pointless; the only point I advanced was that this newbie agent who the MC was unsure of, did manage to get her out of a tight spot. So? 

I just wasn't feeling any of it. It was simply a long string of words. And FAR too much dialogue! My goal has been to stop using dialogue as a crutch. I don't even want to read it back today. 

So I wasted a perfectly good writing day. And I will say that I'm not in love with spelling every #^*!* thing out. I preferred my scene jumping, but readers apparently didn't. But at least that method eliminated all the boring scenes. 

I'm hoping my next start will be more productive and that I'll actually feel like starting. I have a rather important scene in mind, but I can't just "jump" to it without laying some boring groundwork. 

Oh well, everything's fixable, right?