Category: Writing

Posts about writing. Writing is my work but since I work better when I pretend work isn’t work, I mostly call it fun—even when it isn’t. ;)

I refuse to give in to resistance

Lynn

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

Lynn

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

Focus on action and small wins; a new daily minimum

Lynn

Today I’m starting work on my book much later than I planned. Mostly because I’ve spent too much of the day thinking about a decision I made a couple days ago and trying to decide if it’s the right one. I’ve finally decided it is.

Tuesday, I decided to lower my minimum word count for a day to 500 words. That was a good call, I think. My average daily word count is 614 words. Since I have a complete record of every day’s word count since mid-2012, this isn’t a guess. This is my actual daily word count average for more than 5 years of writing.

That said, just because I’ve averaged 614 words a day for 5 years doesn’t mean 500 words a day should be a no-problem, no-trouble, easy daily goal for me. Averages are just that: averages. And averages never tell the whole story.

Consistent daily writing is still a major problem for me. I do not do well with long term daily writing. My longest streak to date is 122 days and I had to count many days of less than 100 words to even get that.

Writing 500 words a day, every day, will be a considerable challenge. But I don’t think I can go any lower than that, just because it doesn’t feel reasonable and it doesn’t feel like a challenge. It feels like giving up.

Daily, it’s only a small win, but 500 words a day will get me a book of average size (50,000 words) in 100 days. Meaning even if I totally fail at all else and ONLY write the 500 words a day every day and never one word more, I’ll write more words in the next 12 months than I wrote in the last two years combined by a little more than 40,000 words.

That’s a win, no matter how I look at it.

And my hope is, as always, that this small win will drive me to write more and reach some of the bigger goals I have.

Every time I write more than 500 words a day, it’s going to push my average up, and I’m going to get that much closer to my long-term goal of being a prolific writer. I can’t ask for much more than that considering where I’m starting from.

But I have to start somewhere and becoming a consistent daily writer is where I’m choosing to start.

The fact is, a small win is better than no win, and I have to start focusing on action if I want to change.

This isn’t just a post about intentions; this is a post of action! I made this minimum word count change two days ago on Tuesday. On both Tuesday and Wednesday, I successfully met this challenge with 517 words and 533 words, respectively.

Yay! I have a new writing streak going. :-)

Now, it’s time to go write and keep this thing alive.

Update: Yep, I did it. 520 words for the day.

Writing and an experiment with mealtimes

Lynn

Yay! I’ve been writing today. Nowhere near the amount of writing I wanted to do, and my only excuse for that is distractions, but it’s nice to NOT be struggling to sit down and write.

One distraction of note is my new mealtime schedule. I’m still trying to lose some of the weight I gained after transitioning from a job to writing at home and it seems I’ve plateaued. Therefore, I’m moving meal times to 7 a.m., 11 a.m., and 3 p.m. :-)

The new mealtimes should make snacks much less appealing, reduce my meal sizes, and give me a longer fasting period overnight. It’s also a mealtime schedule I grew up with and maintained into my twenties. It’s an experiment, doubly interesting because it loosely matches the mealtimes I had during all the years when I was at my ideal weight. I’m hoping the new mealtimes will work to my strengths and shore up some of my weaknesses. I like going to bed on an empty stomach and always try not to eat in the few hours before bed, but I don’t like feeling hungry during the day—in fact, when I get hungry, I feel sick and weak, and I don’t like that feeling at all. Ideally, I’ll go to bed on an empty stomach, but won’t actually get hungry until really close to my bedtime which I’m finally getting moved back to a reasonable hour for me. :-)

As a first run today, I’m pretty happy with what I found. I ate almost exactly what I ate yesterday, just so I’d have something to compare. Because I ate it all so much closer together, I realized really quickly that my meals these days are probably still too big. I think I’ll be able to scale back the amount of food I eat and not really notice it at all. And that, I hope, will help me lose a few of these stubborn pounds I need to lose!

Anyway, I’m sleepy and I’m calling it a night. 466 words. May tomorrow be better than today!

Here I am writing about my schedule again instead of writing

Lynn

(1) I need to write. I have a book I really should have finished writing months and months ago.

(2) I tried another schedule. I hate schedules. I don’t know why I keep trying to make one that I’ll like, because I’m never going to like one of them, except in the most theoretical way possible. Those I love. Then I try to actually use them. My most recent schedules were great on paper. None of them worked, not even once, in my actual life.

(3) Word count goals inspire me and terrify me. I love the idea of them, but I hate having to do the work.

(4) I haven’t finished reading Do the work.

(5) I should probably finish reading Do the work.

(6) I’m spending valuable writing time writing this blog post.

(7) I deleted all my writing schedules.

(8) As soon as I publish this post, I’m going to switch to my book document, start my timer, and start editing the last full paragraph I’ve written. Then I’m going to keep writing until it’s time to stop. (I have clothes in the dryer.)

(9) I don’t know why I’m so convinced I love writing stories. I sure do spend a lot of time not wanting to write them.

Mindset this morning

Lynn

I’m ready to get to work this morning. I’m getting a lot closer to an early morning rise, but I’m still not there yet. My 9 to 12 block of writing time is still just a little off because of that.

It’s 9:51, though, so not too far from it, and I’m going to start writing as soon as I finish this post.

In my post about breaking patterns, I mentioned that I had picked up some books on writing and started reading them and that I have started listening to author/writer podcasts again.

One thing I’ve done on my schedule that seems to have made a difference is to change my “Writing time” to “Yay! Writing time.” I do realize how silly that sounds, as if just adding “Yay!” to the block is enough to change how I feel about it, but… it kind of is. :-) Silly or not, it seems to be helping my mindset.

I got the tip from Stick with It, a book I have not finished reading (and I admit, I got on sale, because I would not have paid what is currently the full price for it). I got bored after the first few chapters and skipped ahead to the chapter on neurohacks and read a little of it. (This was nearly a week ago.) (I read nonfiction out of order all the time, so this isn’t unusual and it’s not a knock against the book.)

I’m pretty excited that it’s working for now, but I know not to get ahead of myself. I oftentimes react well to novel things and then lose the ability to benefit from them as they become less novel to me. :-)

Anyway, it’s 10:04 and I want to get to work on my book. I’m holding out considerable hope that if I get on a roll today I can finish it. I’ll post updates later about my writing.

Breaking patterns

Lynn

I had to take some drastic measures to get myself working again, and it’s turned out to be a pretty simple thing. What I’ve done, I think, is just break some patterns I’d slipped into.

First, I bought a couple of books, after writing a blog post I never posted.

I would resolve not to make excuses for these behaviors but I’ve already done that. And I don’t often make excuses. I just don’t do the work.

That’s what’s going to have to change. I have to become someone who does the work.

Which brings to mind a book I’ve been meaning to read for a long time but haven’t.

Do the Work by Steven Pressfield, and Turning Pro.

Reading books about writing is always motivational for me. I need to spend more time doing it. Even when I feel like it’s using up writing time, because the alternative is a low interest in writing and using none of that bountiful writing time to write anyway.

Do the Work is interesting. A little hype-y at times, but I’ve picked up a few thoughts from it that I really want to remember. I’m really looking forward to reading Turning Pro, but Do the Work felt much more like it was what I was meant to be reading at that moment. :-)

I’m just over halfway through it now, 56% according to my Kindle, and my goal is to keep reading it and Turning Pro (and The Warrior Ethos) until I’ve finished them all before I move on to reading anything else.

Second, I’m listening to writer podcasts, something I used to do but stopped when I decided I was probably wasting time doing it. I think it was a mistake to stop, because listening to them makes me excited about writing even when it’s material I’ve heard before. Yes, they use up a lot of time, but since I listen while I cook, eat, and do other things, that keeps my interest in writing high even when I’m distracted with other things.

I credit listening to these yesterday and the day before with my sudden increase in discipline and my renewed interest in writing. I stuck to a schedule yesterday, even if it was a loose schedule, and I really put some effort into writing for the first time in nearly two weeks.

:D

So there, that’s what I’m doing to break the patterns that I’ve felt like I was trapped in for the last few weeks, and I’m finally making progress on my current book again.

If you’re having difficulties sitting down to write, not because you don’t have time, but because your interest has waned (especially for reasons you don’t understand), try something like this. It really has helped. :-)

Tomorrow

Lynn

Whoa. I know it’s October, but this is a very unpleasant forecast from weather.gov.

I don’t like the cold and those temperatures will certainly feel cold to me.

On another note, totally unrelated to the forecast, I’ve let it get to 11:14 PM and I still haven’t written anything today. Looks like I’m going to have to take charge of myself and my excuses.

Probably tomorrow.

>:-(

Or not.

Guess I better start now. I’m going to settle in (in bed!) and do at least a twenty minute session before I call it a night. I know now what I need to do to this book and I’ve put off doing it all day. I will do it tomorrow, but tonight, I’m going to start doing it now.

I’ll feel better about myself after I do it, too.

Holy crap, I just don’t know what the problem is

Lynn

I can’t seem to get started writing. I’m at a total loss as to what the problem is.

I’ve tried setting goals, ignoring goals, getting more sleep, writing early (couldn’t get started!), writing late (couldn’t get started!), tracking my time, journaling before I write, journaling as I write (couldn’t get started!), reading, staring at my book, blocking the internet, blocking distracting sites, journaling in a notebook, journaling on the computer, calling myself unpleasant names, being gentle with myself, and I could go on but what’s the point?

The point is I can’t get started even though part of my brain wants to get started. It’s an inexplicable feeling that makes no rational sense, and when I try to click to my document, it feels like a compulsion forcing me away.

It should not be this damn hard to get yourself to do something you know you need to do, and that, overall, you actually enjoy doing.

What it comes down to, it seems, is that I want to have written the rest of this book but I don’t actually want to write the rest of this book.

This is probably why it’s important not to let yourself think of writing as hard. Because when something becomes hard in your head, whether or not it is in fact, it becomes susceptible to resistance.

Is there any way that accepting this can help me get over my resistance to getting started?

And on a tangent, I think the whole idea of creating a writing habit is stupid. You can’t create a writing habit. Habits are involuntary behaviors. How the fuck is sitting down to write thousands of words an involuntary behavior?

Well, I can see the sitting down part as being involuntary if you repeat it often enough.

(I’m probably being too literal again, or reductionist, but I can’t help it. That’s where my thoughts go when I think writing habit.)

It’s just something that has annoyed me, and maybe it’s because of this habit creep that’s going on in the self-help world.

Or maybe I’m just annoyed because I should be writing fiction and I’m writing this instead. GAHHHH.

The fact is, just sitting down at my computer out of habit, even opening my document, isn’t enough to get me to write. I’ve been doing that for ages. I’m still not writing as often or as much as I want. Not in any universe.

And I’ve been at my computer all day today, and it sure the fuck hasn’t led me to write my book’s ending.

Not again—no, really, not again

Lynn

Yesterday I didn’t write. Today I’ve had trouble getting started and it’s already into the late afternoon.

I had hoped to write without a timer today, but I don’t think that’s going to work for me. Oftentimes, if I start the timer, I feel obligated to let it run, and once it’s running I feel obligated to stay on task. So although I want to write without the necessity of a timer, I seem to have a lot of difficulty actually doing that. It makes me feel a little bit like a failure to need that crutch, but the rational part of me says that’s ridiculous, because the timer is a tool that helps me overcome the difficulties I have focusing on anything long enough to get anywhere.

On that note, I must go write, because time is running out and I have a lot to write today.

Here I am again

Lynn

It has been an odd day. I felt pretty good today, after the best night of sleep I’ve had in a while. I went to bed early, stayed warm, and woke up about two hours before I wanted to. I read for a few minutes then went back to sleep and woke up about two hours later. All told, I had a solid eight hours of sleep and it paid off.

I had two cups of a mild green tea mix today (low caffeine) and stayed away from coffee. I don’t feel jittery and my head is clear.

Yet, somehow, it has reached 8:34 pm and I haven’t written any fiction at all today.

My schedule is killing my productivity

Lynn

No joke, my schedule is killing my productivity. The unfortunate truth is that I need a schedule. That doesn’t seem to matter. I can’t stop myself from constantly making changes to any schedule I create, and even when I leave it wide open for writing and just fill in the basics like lunch, supper, and the like, I still can’t stop messing with it.

It turns out that having a schedule is just a massive distraction I don’t know how to handle.

Is this that moment where I look back and realize I really should have seen this coming? Probably.

Seriously, it’s time to end this thing

Lynn

Alright, it’s time to put an end to my misery. I have to finish this book. Today.

Toward that end—:D—I’ve set a loose schedule and some time goals. (Time spent is really the only thing I can totally control when it comes to my writing. I’ve tried to make time quotas work in the past and they haven’t but I don’t think that changes the fundamental truth that if I want to create a daily habit of writing, I’m going to have to focus on time.)

From 11:00 – 3:15, I’m going to try to get in 3 sessions of 1.25 hours each.

I’m already late getting started because of the kittens (they think my deck is a litter box and I’m trying to break them of that habit as quickly as I can) and this post (I shouldn’t be writing it now but here I am), and there isn’t enough break time built in to make the time up easily, but I’m still going to push for it even if that means going past 3:15. If the book isn’t done by then, and I don’t really think it will be…

From 4:15 – 7:00, I’m going to try to get in 2 sessions of 1.25 hours each.

First note: As of right now, I’m planning all my future sessions to be 1.25 hours each, except on days where I might just need to write and be in a hurry and don’t keep up with time at all. I don’t want to feel locked in to the idea that I can’t write or work on my stories just because I don’t have 1.25 hours available. Those days should be rare, because I’m trying to get into a routine and this is the equivalent of my job and the work has to be done. If I can’t squeeze in a few 1.25 hour blocks of time a day for writing, then I have bigger problems. A person has to make a living somehow.

Second note: I did some reading and rereading of a few things and I’ve become convinced that pushing myself past the 4–5 hour range for time spent writing is a mistake. I deal with low motivation regularly after what I consider really good writing days, and there’s a simple explanation: burnout and need for extra rest after pushing too hard.

If I were used to longer periods of focus, it might be different, but I don’t think so. K. Anders Ericsson has some really good papers on deliberate practice and high performance. (Some other related links.) Considering the fact that I’m still under the two million words written mark for fiction (probably), I still feeling like I’m doing high-level practice every time I sit down to write. I’m not sure the good writers ever quit practicing, though, so it’s not something I expect to change. I will always be trying to get better.

One quote:

Elite performers in many diverse domains have been found to practice, on the average, roughly the same amount every day, including weekends, and the amount of practice never consistently exceeds five hours per day.

And from one of the linked papers:

Across many domains of expertise, a remarkably consistent pattern emerges: The best individuals start practice at earlier ages and maintain a higher level of daily practice. Moreover, estimates indicate that at any given age the best individuals in quite different domains, such as sports and music, spend similar amounts of time on deliberate practice. In virtually all domains, there is evidence that the most important activity—practice, thinking, or writing—requires considerable effort and is scheduled for a fixed period during the day. For those exceptional individuals who sustain this regular activity for months and years, its duration is limited to 2-4 h a day, which is a fraction of their time awake.

Going from my daily average word count and the fact that I average 400-600 words an hour during timed writing sessions, I average about 2 hours a day of writing time. Then I read and study and think. Publishing activities drive up the time I spend working even more. I’m going to stop feeling so damn guilty for not putting in even more time. If I ever make it up to 4 hours of writing a day, consistently, I am determined that I’ll be damn happy about it.

Anyway, I just wasted a huge chunk of time on this post and I must go write. This book is going to end today, one way or another. And yes, 5 x 1.25 = 6.25 hours. I’m pushing myself, but I’m tired of dallying with this book. I want it done.

Struggling to finish this book

Lynn

I’m struggling with the schedule I made for myself, mostly because it’s really a schedule meant for my daily writing of 1,000–3,000 words. At the moment, I don’t even have a real goal, because all my focus is on finishing my book. The more often I repeat “finish the book” though, the more I seem to avoid writing anything at all.

I’m also struggling because I have significant difficulties keeping up with the passage of time in my head. Explicit start and end times for my daily activities don’t work well for me—and they never have, even when I worked for other people. It’s just not something I’m good at. I got things done and was considered a very productive employee, although I’m really not sure how that happened. Deadlines and the fact that I cared what other people thought of me, I think. I should feel that way about the people reading my books too, I guess, but for some reason I never have. Maybe it’s because I’ve always considered myself to be writing for myself, first and foremost, and for other people as an afterthought.

Anyway, it all comes down to me needing to do something just a little different tomorrow, because what I’ve been trying to do today and in the days before hasn’t been working.

I wrote -96 words yesterday

Lynn

How is it even possible to write negative words? In case you’re new here, let me explain my tracking sheet.

I put in my current doc’s word count, and it tells me how many words I’ve written today. As you can see, today’s total is zero at the moment. (The 3,333 below today’s count is the goal and it is a formula that will tell me how many words I have to go to get to that goal.)

Starting at row 10 is the list of all my works in progress and below that all my completed works, with word counts noted. That’s where I update my word counts to get an updated cumulative word count. The previous total number is manually adjusted each day so that the spreadsheet will calculate an accurate number of words for today. This lets me work on as many stories as I want in one day and still have a central place to track that word count.

I’m sure some people would like to have individual spreadsheets for each book or story, but I really don’t want or need that much granular detail. I tried adding another step into my tracking process for a while, but keeping up with one more sheet was just too much of a time waster for me.

Anyway, my point is that I have negative words because I obviously deleted more than I added, so at the end of the day my word count in the doc for my current book was lower than it was at the beginning of the day. For my sheet to be accurate, I have to record my doc’s actual word count. I like it that way even if it does leave me in the hole some days.

Sadly, -96 words is nowhere near the 1,500 word goal I set myself last night. I fell down hard on that. My only excuse is, well, an excuse. I’ll take a pass on making it.

Goal: 1,500 words before bed

Lynn

So I put off writing today because I had family home and couldn’t seem to get started while people were here. I’ve had two hours since but still haven’t been able to get started so I thought I’d post this in hopes it would jiggle loose my motivation and get me focused. :-)

Right now the goal is to get 1,500 words before bed. I started this post at 9 PM but somehow it’s now 9:45 PM so I’m not sure it’s realistic to expect 1,500 words. On the other hand, I need them, so maybe I’ll just have to do it anyway.

Let’s say 750 wph with a timer set for 2 hours. That could still put me in bed around midnight if I don’t get distracted again. I can do midnight. I’ll be back as soon as I need a break to update with my progress.

Journal writing is still writing

Lynn

The journaling experiment isn’t working out as I’d hoped. The biggest thing I’ve learned is that when I don’t want to write, I don’t even want to journal, so making myself journal about not writing to get me to write is as hard as making myself just start writing.

I should have guessed the outcome of this experiment. Journal writing is writing, first and foremost, and when I’m having trouble getting started writing, I’m generally having trouble getting started with anything. I turn to OCD-like behaviors to draw me in and keep me from thinking about the fact that I’m not doing what I want or need to be doing, and it works. It soothes that part of me that can’t focus or concentrate on writing.

Not that I understand any of that, but it’s true. That’s what happens.

LeechBlock is great; LeechBlock doesn’t work

Lynn

So. I added up my word counts for the time period that began after I added LeechBlock to my browser, and lo and behold, I had my worst week in a month or thereabouts.

I turned LeechBlock off yesterday. Yesterday I wrote just over 1,000 words, and then I did the same today.

I’ve decided that it’s not the internet that’s the problem, it’s me.

Shoulda seen that coming.

Pushing for a finish today; must write faster!

Lynn

I haven’t finished my current book in progress despite having been trying to finish it for a couple of weeks now. Today I’m pushing for a finish, although I know it’s going to be tricky. I don’t have a clue where the story is going to come together, only a vague notion that something is going to have to happen before I can end it because I need my main character to play a more active role in the ending here and so far he just hasn’t stepped up. He’s gonna have to step up. That’s all there is to it.

I need at least one solid chapter to finish up the climax and maybe half another. Then I need some wrap up scenes, so that’ll be another chapter at least.

My chapters range anywhere from 2,000 to 2,800 words, rarely more, but sometimes, so I can’t rule that out. That means 4,800 words minimum to end this thing, even though I wanted my word count for this book to max out at 65,000 words. It hasn’t. The book is now the third longest book in the series. It’s questionable at this point if it’ll remain only the third longest because I’m getting uncomfortably close to the length of the second longest.

So…practice time. I’m going for 800 words per hour, writing in 15 minute bursts. That’s a goal of 200 words for each session of 15 minutes.

That is a push, but practice time it is.

In other news, I’ve reinstituted some personal rules to help me stay away from time sucking activities online. LeechBlock is set to block me from most of the internet from 7 am to noon and 2 pm to midnight.

I’m doing this because I’m just spending too much time on places like K boards.

Which, in another note, I’ve decided might be the wrong table for me to sit at.

Most of the authors there take self-publishing much too seriously for me. I realize publishing is my income source and that I do need to treat the business aspects of it as a business, but the rest of it is for me to do as I please. I don’t treat the publishing part as a traditional business and I don’t want to. I much prefer to be the artisan and do my own thing until I have a product ready to sell. But then when I have the product ready I really prefer to be the person at the flea market or the little corner shop and not really the mass marketing Walmart. I’ll be honest, that’s a terrible analogy, but it’s all I can come up with at 9:12 a.m. in the morning when I just know that I need to stop visiting that site as much as I do and I keep going back and forth and I continue to visit and I continue to read the forum day after day to excess and I continue to find many of the people’s attitudes there quite infuriating at times. And nothing throws me off my game more than being angry does. I think it’s normal to want to be accepted, even looked up to, by your peers, but when your beliefs are so far outside the norm in the group, it’s not going to work out that way unless you start conforming. That price is too high for some of us. It comes to this: Kboards is not good for my mental equilibrium. Know thyself, as they say.

And my final note today: this was written on my phone using the default Google speech-to-text so if it is somewhat unreadable I’m sorry. But the one thing I’m not going to do is override the LeechBlock settings and allow myself to get online and post on my blog before I’ve had a chance to do my writing today.

Now, time to get up and get this day started. It’s my birthday. :)

New rule: midnight cutoff for word counts

Lynn

I make rules for myself all the time. Most of them don’t stick around. I don’t drink coffee, but I had a cup today and a cup yesterday and a cup the day before. Which begs the question: how many cups of coffee can you drink and still claim you don’t drink coffee?

Anyway.

I’ve made myself a new rule, and it’s going to come across as self-serving because it’s 20 minutes past midnight and the rule is to stop writing for the day at midnight. I mean, I can keep writing if I want, but from now on, words written before midnight go on one day and words written after midnight go on the next.

The purpose of this rule is to help me get my sleep routine back into a reasonable shape. I’m tired of staying up until 2 a.m. and then not being able to sleep until 10 a.m. to get a solid 8 hours of sleep. I’m lucky to sleep until 8 and toss and turn until 9-ish.

In other words, I’m tired of being tired.

If I don’t allow myself to count tomorrow’s words today, I won’t have any motivation at all to stay up trying to catch up for lost time (which I was trying to do right before I made this rule, hence my calling its creation self-serving).

But yeah. It’s after midnight and there’s no point feeling guilt over the words I didn’t write today, because today is over and any words I write now won’t get counted.

I will finish the book tomorrow. Or try to anyway.

Goodnight!