“One more week,” I told one of the teachers today, as we waited on the patio for our turns in the restrooms. Next Tuesday is the last day of school. I asked her what she was doing this summer, she talked of traveling, and asked me. “Oh, I’m going to be writing,” I announced. “I have a goal to submit something by August.”
She’s a writer too, surprise. And off we went, chatting on and on. She told me she’s working on a novel, but it’s a novel in search of a plot, so she’s stalled. I told her I had the same problem in my first book, and I have to deal with it repeatedly in each successive book. She asked how many I’ve written. I told her I’m finishing the fourth.
“How do you do it?” she asked. “How do you make yourself work on it, when there’s so much else that needs doing?” She knows I’m a single mom, and even if I weren’t, who isn’t busy anymore?
Urrmm…do I tell her I haven’t written a damn thing since Friday night? Do I tell her I plant my butt in front of my computer every night, intending to get back to Rafe and Taro, and instead I go surfing and usually wind up reading anime fanfic, some of it really awful, and most of it of–well, questionable–taste?
No! I told her how I wrote my first book, only ‘earning’ days marked off on my Star Trek Generations poster-calendar if I wrote two pages that day, and so built a habit of writing nearly every day that got my New Year’s resolution achieved at 0400, December 30. Then dropped it, and writing, for YEARS while life taught me some seriously nasty lessons. She asked what got me back to writing. I told her because I don’t want to work for a living!
She agreed wholeheartedly. I also told her that I blog my word count, so the whole world knows (or at least can come and see, should the whole world be interested) when I’m falling down on the job. And I keep in close e-contact with BJ, and we thump each other in the motivation as needed.
We ended up exchanging e-mail addresses, so looks like I’ll have someone else to give me a thump when I start screwing off. It’s all to the good…