Tag Archives: procrastination

just write the book

Good morning. It’s a Tuesday out there. Are you ready?

I have been reading books about writers recently, having found Writers [on Writing] (a collection of essays about writing from the New York Times) and the Glimmer Train Guide to Writing Fiction, Vol. 2: Inspiration and Discipline on my sweetheart’s bookshelf. I am looking, over and over, for one thing: I want them to tell me how they do it. How do they get up and get themselves to the desk? How do they make the writing happen? How how how. I don’t want the theory — I want the practical: I get this much sleep, I get up at 6, I sit at the typewriter/keyboard/notebook and do not stop for two hours or six or forty-five minutes. Then I get up and I do something completely different. If I write a page, that’s great. If I get two new sentences, I feel successful. Eventually it all coagulates into a book.

Later, I’ll want the next part — how to get an agent, how to get it published, how to get it edited enough that someone besides my best friends will willingly read it. For now I’m still at the beginning and this is what I’m looking for: how to incorporate writer into a real life that also includes job and family and friends. Tell me how to we take care of our bodies while we do that, how to get a book finished when we have too many jobs and everyone’s telling us it’s impossible, how to write a book when we’re depressed and disappointed, how to do it anyway. Continue reading

un-practicing procrastination

graffiti: big red heart with the words "love yourself!" in cursive, written underneathGood morning good morning!

I’ve just had to go replenish my tea — moroccan mint (green with some mint) and nettle and tulsi and anise and cardamom. Today I needed a little bit of everything, I’m throwing in all the bombs, trying to figure out what will land, what will stick, what will help.

~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~

Continue reading

what hasn’t worked for you?

graffiti -- cartoon blackbird standing upright, wings pushed behind Sending you big love and encouragement today — Fridays, as you’ll remember I recently decided, are my writing days. They’re supposed to be days that I devote just to my own writing stuff, and not to workshop stuff or day job stuff or other people’s writing stuff.

So far today, I’ve spent about 30 minutes on my own writing and 4.5 hours on reading the local weekly cover to cover, weeding through email, reading facebook, researching computers, making tea and breakfast, following friends’ facebook links to other websites that needed in-depth exploration, a day-job work conversation (which was with a friend, but it was about work, and either way, it was not about or doing my writing), playing with the computer to make the monitors work right, making more tea … so, maybe I should say more honestly that Fridays are devoted to procrastination.

I’ve been devoted to writing since I was 6, and wanted to be an ‘author’ since I understood that that’s what the people whose job it was to make books were called. For the past 10 years I’ve been writing with some desire for publication, and have had some stuff published. I’ve written with many people in that time, and have learned some stuff about publication from their experiences, too.

Continue reading