Friday, November 19, 2010

De-ritualization


Melissa is off watching the adventures of some boy wizard (maybe you've heard of him?), and I get to stay home and finish up my writing for the day. I think it's a fair trade.

It occurs to me, having started doing these almost-daily updates, that my writing schedule must seem fairly erratic. That's actually a choice as much as it is a necessity. I've spent the last years of my life intentionally de-ritualizing my writing process. I feel like I've spent, possibly wasted, a lot of time in the past waiting for inspiration to strike. And I did lots of things to try and court inspiration -- I always sat in the same place, I always wrote at the same time. Hell, there was a time when I had to have a candle and some incense burning. Lately, I have purposefully gotten away from all of that. Like I said, part of that is necessity. I'm a stay-at-home dad, I have to be able to sit down whenever and where ever the opportunity presents itself.

Some days it's harder than others to get into the writing, but there hasn't been a day I can recall in this semester that I haven't been able to write at all. And I've skipped days certainly, but that's mostly because I sometimes need sleep more than I need to write. Another hazard of being a writer raising a child.

The twitter post from Roger Ebert that illustrates this post really says it all. I wish I could go back in time and tell this to my younger self. Not that my younger self would believe it. My younger self was sort of a jerk. A bigger jerk, I should say.

I guess I can be happy that I've finally learned the lesson. Better late than never, I'm getting the writing done.

And here are today's numbers.

Daily word count: 1,734 (1,001 novel, 733 short)
Monthly word count: 20,854 (17,340 novel, 3,514 short)
Novel word count: 88,841

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