How to Restart Your Work after an Unplanned Pause

<p>Ok, we probably don’t feel as cheery as that little subtitle sounded after we’ve been away from a project for a while. Most of the things that yank us away from our work unexpectedly aren’t good things. (There must be exceptions?)</p><p>In my case, I got sick, and then I overdid and got sicker, and the result is a project I haven’t touched in a week. Which is SO not that bad or that long—sometimes things happen and it’s a month or more before we can get back into the work—but it made me think about what I do when I’m forced to stop and re-start. </p><p>* Forgive yourself. Might you have been able to do better? Maybe. Would a <em>real writer</em> have managed to work through whatever it was? Maybe. And maybe, if you’d really had to, you would have. Or maybe not—sometimes even people with deadlines and editors and fans clamoring need to put their work aside for a while, because sometimes you just cannot. Or sometimes you do anyway, and maybe, as I once did, you turn in an article during one of the worst weeks of your life thus far and it includes a recipe for Miso Roasted Cod in which you forget to include the miso, which is published because apparently there were no backstops at this particular entity, thus ending your recipe writing career forevermore. (Obviously that worked out ok, but 21 years ago I would have told you my life was over.) Let it go. You needed time. You took it. It’s for the best.</p><p>* Check in. Is it really time to get back to this? Can you look ahead and see yourself getting back into whatever routine is in the cards for you now, or are you setting yourself up to disappoint yourself? Look, only you know. Some people write at the worst times. Some people wait for better times. Sometimes those are the same people at different points in their lives. It is okay to hunch over a laptop under circumstances when people think you should be doing something else, and it is okay to decide to re-read all of Anne of Green Gables even when the waters are calm again.</p><p>* Do your commit-thing. If it’