Slowly but Surely, Except for the Surely Part

Since the last batch of blog entries, i.e., for the last couple of weeks, I’ve been faithfully following rule #1: Write Every Day. Getting back into the habit was less difficult than I had expected, perhaps because of reinforcing factors like the fact that I usually go to the same place to do it, which happens to be the local Starbucks. Whatever the reason, I started out expecting to get going @ 10 minutes a day, but quickly moved up to basically draining the laptop’s battery each day and then going home andthinking about the project.

This sounds good and all, and it’s better than not writing every day, but there have been different kinds of problems. First, when I got back from the last trip I had many distractions, some of which were related to the following:

• Photography (gear I had missed on the last trip and thus needed to learn about/find, photo cleanup & posting, paperwork & more)
• Getting the Lemonavion purged of its latest crop of evil-RV issues, in preparation for the next trip
• Other gear-related matters (including one in particular to be discussed separately)
• Paying the attention demanded by cat in the photo there

Even so I’ve managed to get on a schedule where writing gets a good chunk of time blocked off to itself daily. But there have been distractions during that time, including:

• Having been out of the mindset of writing for so long, it’s been hard to get back into it.
• Having been away from the story and characters, it’s been hard to get back into feeling like I’m within them, so to speak.
• The local Starbucks is seeming less like a place to go to to focus on writing, and more like a place to go because that in itself has become habitualized. And I don’t even like coffee.
• Hundreds of women walking by in short shorts every day doesn’t help concentration either.

It may be time to find a new place to go every day, or to train myself to do it at home or the office, but I feel like I should just brute-force my way through finishing the first draft before making any changes to the routine. I guess that’s what I’ll do.

Still, it seems to take a long time to get anything written now, though, and it often feels less natural than it did before. Perhaps as a result of this, I often find myself tweaking existing parts of the book instead of writing the new stuff that’s needed to get the first draft finished.

I guess the answer is always the same in this life: never give up, try; try again; git ’er done; just do it; however you want to say it. So, that’s what I’ll do.