Brain Fertilizer

I just knocked out another 1300 words on my novel over the last hour or so. Not great stuff, but adequate for the task, which is just finishing the dang thing!

I'll polish and revise later.

I'm finding that the biggest obstacle to writing is...writing.

Yeah, that's so deep it's almost...confusing.

But what happens is that I write something, and then I feel so smug/proud, and then I decide that since I'm back in the saddle, maybe I have some chance to enjoy other fun activities. And before I know it, 4-5 days have gone by without writing.

Ah, well, I have 2 young kids and a stressful job that affect my writing mood. It really doesn't matter how long this novel takes. It doesn't matter, even, whether or not it is ever published. The point is to finish a novel, to hold a complete idea in my mind and practice developing plot, characters, sub-plots, and improving my dialogue and descriptive skills. The second novel will be an attempt to write a top-notch novel, and the third will finally be the one in which I make a serious attempt to establish a writing discipline.

The way I see it, if I can finish a respectable (if not publishable) novel with as many distractions as I have now, it can only get easier. I've learned so much just in this push to get beyond 10,000 words on the first one. I've never written that much before, and I'm encountering situations and issues that are stretching my writing and plotting ability. That will pay off on later novels. I don't need to worry about being a full time writer ever...but at the very least I have a good 10 years to see what I can do as a writer while still working a full-time job. We'll see if I even have a writing career at that point. Maybe not. So what? I'm enjoying myself at this point. If it ever stops being fun, I'll stop doing it.