I refuse to give in to resistance

Again today I’ve let the time creep on, and here it is 7:09 p.m. and I haven’t written any fiction at all. I really don’t know why I keep doing this, but I don’t want to break my streak, which is up to 4 days now, so I’m going to overcome this. Since I also don’t want to stay up until 2 a.m. again (although tonight it will immediately become 1 a.m. again!), I need to start now.

I’d like to get in 4 or 5 hours of writing. Honestly, I’m toying with the idea of just setting my clock back now and pretending it’s 6:11 p.m. Why not? There’s nothing stopping me.

Except every time I look at the clock on my computer, it’s 7:11 and it’s hard to play mind games with yourself when the clock is conspiring against you.

Still, it does mean I can stay up until 1 a.m. writing, go to bed, and get up at 8 and feel like I got 8 hours of sleep instead of 7. Of course, reality says I’ll wake up at 6 and find it impossible to get back to sleep because it’ll be daylight. No simple change to the clock is going to change what time my body thinks it is until I’ve retrained it.

That’s the beauty of working for myself, at home, though. I can adjust, or not, as I see fit. This would be the perfect time to start getting into bed earlier and getting up early, because my body will feel like I’ve slept until 8 at 7 a.m.

What that means is that I’d better get to writing. Turns out I don’t want to stay up late tonight, because I’d rather let the time change do the hard work of readjusting my sleep schedule for me.

 

A small win last night that bodes well

Yesterday I somehow made it until nearly 1:00 a.m. without writing. But I was determined not to break my 500 words a day streak so I finally overcame the resistance to getting started and sat down and wrote.

Instead of 500 words, I ended up with 1,004. Considering I didn’t use a timer and honestly only intended to get 500 words and then go to sleep, I think that’s pretty amazing. I went to sleep around 2:20 and don’t feel so hot this morning, of course, because I’ve now had two nights in a row of about six hours of sleep, but I feel great that I had that small win turn into a big win.

After four days of the 500 word minimum, my daily average of 644 words is already better than my all time daily average of 614.

This is exactly the result I was hoping to see. It only takes a few days of better than 500 words a day to start pumping up my average. And 500 a day feels like such a doable number of words. It’s enough of a commitment to writing each day to make me feel accomplished and it also seems to be enough words to set off the creative part of my brain so that I’m actually getting somewhere instead of just staying stuck in place.

What I mean by that is that with say 100 words, I can often add a little here and there and never actually move the story forward. I might be able to get away with editing enough words into a scene to reach 500 words once, maybe twice if the writing was thin to begin with, but after that, I have to move forward, which is what happened last night. Once I started moving forward, I didn’t even have to work to pick up momentum. The story was pulling me forward.

Now, despite all that success after midnight last night, I don’t want to repeat the after midnight part tonight, so I’m going to go write. This story is actually interesting me again, and I feel a need to make some more progress on that never-ending ending I’ve got going on! I’ll post later with results, unless I fall asleep at the keyboard. :D