Writing every day ain't easy, lemme tell ya. There are days when the world has had its way with you. There are days when you're just tired. There are days when the words just won't come out. There are days when you spent 7 minutes kneading pizza dough earlier and now your hands/wrists/arms hurt too much to want to type. (Oh, wait, that last one is just me.)
Previously, when any of those types of days happened, I would give myself a pass and not write that day. I'm the CEO of this business. I can give myself a day off.
Except one day off leads to two days off and two days off leads to... You get the gist. And genuine reasons for taking a day off lead to excuses for taking a day off. 'My hands are killing me today' as a reason turns into 'I'm a little sore' as an excuse. And the next thing you know, you haven't written a damn word for weeks... err, months.
At least that's how it works for me.
So, this month, no matter how I feel physically or mentally, I'm writing every day. Sure, it's not always a lot of words. That 300-something day, oddly enough, wasn't due to anything but that the story wasn't talking to me. I ended up forcing it to talk and got the 300+. Right now, I'm averaging just under 950 words a day. That seems about right, seeing as I was shooting for about 1K a day. And more than that in a session makes my hands hurt.
One day, I was totally not in a place where I wanted to write. Everything was coming at me in a perfect storm for not writing, so I decided to give myself a pass. Then, long about bedtime, the guilt hit me. I made it perfectly clear I was going to write every day. Not every day unless something made me not want to write. Lucky for me, the cat helped there. I ended up not going to bed because the cat decided she didn't want to pee at the time I wanted her to pee. And since I was up and the house was quiet, I sat my ass down at the keyboard and wrote. Not a lot of words and not great words, but I got words out.
Writing every day ain't easy. But it's necessary. For me. At this particular time and place. Get the words out and get them down. Finish the damn book that's been waiting to be finished for months now. And I will do it.
Sing it, sister! Me, too. Right there with you but with a whole different set of excuses. Forcing myself to write occasionally blooms into massive amounts of words! I even got 3K one day. Of course, I remember when I used to do 3K in the morning and 3K in the afternoon. Or more. I long for those days but RL jumps up and circumvents what used to be. Ah well. Words are words and as long as we keep adding them, we'll hit the end eventually. And we'll celebrate because it will be an accomplishment.
ReplyDeleteThat's my story and I'm sticking to it. 😉