When trying to dive into writing this second novel, I sat down and looked at it and thought, okay, if you work on a scene/half-chapter a day, ultimately, you could have a first draft ready in roughly 45 days.
Then life sat down beside me, tapped me on the shoulder, and started in with its bullshit.
You’re still going to your day job every day, where you’re going to be nonstop social and thinking and planning and keeping up with every little thing you’ve created to make employees’ lives a little better, right?
Yes, of course, I am. I love my job and I love connecting with coworkers and planning events, attending the ones I can, and thinking ahead to the next initiative. Plus, it pays the bills, and I get a lot of satisfaction from it.
You’re gonna come home with that same enthusiasm and make dinner, work out for at least twenty minutes, watch TV with your husband, and practice a nighttime self-care routine that’ll help you wind down after a full day, right?
Well, I…what if I make the workout fifteen minutes, and we warm up dinner, and instead of a movie, we watch one episode of a show we’re binging, and is self-care really that impor—
I’m not finished.
Okay…
You’re going to clean the house, shop for groceries, snuggle with the dogs (which seems to be your top priority 98% of the time), read a book a week (as you promised Goodreads), work on a puzzle because you own like fifty of them and like the disconnect, and pick out your work clothes for the next day, right?
The dogs, of course, and I’ve been getting up an extra hour to read. I hired maids to come once a month…what do you want from me?!?!
I wondered when you’re going to fit in this so-called writing. *crosses arms
I stare blankly.
When are you going to fit it in when you’re too tired from work, or you watch more than one show each night, or you’re brain is mush from everything you’re doing right now so you go to bed early and watch (for the umpteenth time) an episode of Buffy, and why the hell are you writing this blog when you could be working on your actual novel?
I shrug.
But, maybe, more importantly, how are you going to deal with the guilt of not writing daily?
There it is. The guilt. It’s in a constant battle with my other favorite trait…procrastination. They’re like a dynamic duo akin to Bonnie & Clyde, or Veronica & J.D. (Heathers), or Pumpkin & Honey Bunny (Pulp Fiction). But not in a fun way.
It’s true. The very last thing I want to do most days is the very same thing I love doing—writing. I also know if I sit my ass in the chair for an hour each weekday and maybe a couple of hours on the weekend, I wouldn’t be stuck on the second half of chapter four. But then life, yeah, it comes through like a bulldozer. An invisible bulldozer I allow to block the road with things that I could easily not do to make time for writing.
It’s somewhat true at the end of the workday, my brain is goo, and all I want to do is not think. And every day I ignore my work in progress is one more day it’s not completed. Perhaps this is why I took that two-year hiatus on all things writing (outside of emails and such). It’s all so daunting. It’s five hundred pages of rewrites, it’s creating several new or better scenes, it’s sitting hunched over a keyboard for hours at a time only to come up for air with a stiff neck and carpel tunnel. But…again…I love the process. I just need to repeat it as often as I can to get to the finish line.
There are a lot of essays out there about “accepting failure” and “not beating yourself up.” The whole “do your best with what you can and be good to yourself when you can’t” mentality has never sat right with me. I think we should be hard on ourselves. How will we ever achieve greatness, or even sub-par awesomeness, if we sit back on our heels (or, in my case, sit on the couch and watch TV) and not do everything we can, no matter how hard it is to achieve our goals?
If we don’t push ourselves, why bother having any goal at all?
Of course, it’s exhausting. Nothing worth a damn ever feels so good if you haven’t suffered through it to achieve it. It’s like a diet. You want pizza badly, but by powering through the craving and having something healthy, you’re one more step to dropping how many pounds you want to lose. You have to work at it.
So yeah, I’m gonna work at it. And it’s gonna be hard and tiring, and it’s gonna suck up my time, and if I don’t do it, then I’m gonna feel guilty about it. Guilt is part of the process. Guilt will be the thing that kicks me in the ass and lands me in the chair as it will today.
Guilt will be my partner in crime. Hopefully, procrastination will get the hint.
For a sneak peek at the first chapter of my work-in-progress, click HERE.