Getting back to it

I'm not.

Writing, that is.

And I want to be.

Then why aren't I?

Good question.

I could give the excuse that I don't have time. Too many other things to do, like play Scrabble on Facebook or update my blogs (I maintain three--this one, my inspirational blog, and the Punxsy Christian Women's Conference blog.) or edit a manuscript or review CWG lessons or . . .

I need to be writing. And I need to set it as a priority.

In November, I left my heroine in a one-room schoolhouse wondering how to prove that her fiance didn't murder the miner in Whiskey Run. She'd just found the match to the cufflink found at the murder scene in her desk. After 16K words, I let it go. Too much else going on.

I need to get back to it.

I want to get back to it.

I will get back to it.

I'm the type of person who doesn't like to leave things undone. All the laundry had to be done in one day, even if I did seven or ten loads. The entire house had to be cleaned in one day. It irked me that I couldn't lose 25 pounds in one week. Now I have 50 pounds to lose.

"Yard by yard, the going's hard; but inch by inch, it's a cinch."

So I work at it every day, making sure I eat right and get a walk in. Little by little, those pounds will come off. And, at nearly 60, I can't do the laundry or clean the house in one day anymore. I do one load a day, and keep the house "rid up."

So it is with writing a novel.

I must--I will--make it a priority to set aside 15 to 30 minutes a day to work on it. To write. I'll have to fight to urge to "finish the chapter." Finishing can be a hangup. I don't have time to write an entire chapter, so I don't write anything.

A seventeenth century French writer used the ten minutes waiting for his wife to finish dressing for dinner to good use: to write. And in a year, he'd written a book.

Little things add up. Ten minutes six times a week is an hour, four hours a month. It's not what I want--I want four hours a day. But right now I don't have four hours a day. And so my unfinished novel languishes in "someday-land."

I'm going to do a brave thing--some might call it foolhardy. I'm going to post on this blog, every Thursday, how many words I've written in Whiskey Run since the last Thursday blog post.

I'll start today:

Whiskey Run:
Word count: 16,240
Words written since last Thursday (Thursday to Wednesday): 0.

Are you having trouble finding time to write? Don't despair. Just do it. Toss all those negative thoughts and excuses out of your mind and just write!