Writing update for April 13th 2011
Another week down and this week can only be described as an epic fail. My total writing on novel number two was 1,548 words. Add to my novel writing I got another 1,329 words on my previous post about Best Buy, makes almost 3,000 words or half of my writing for the week. I could give you excuses like I’ve been working late or not feeling very good, mostly because I’ve been working too hard, but I won’t bore you or make excuses for myself. Basically it boils down to laziness and not feeling motivated.
I started doing my daily writing partly as fun and partly to see if I could do it. I now know I can write a novel because I’ve finished one, albeit a poorly written one, but I did it none the less. I’ve also found if I force myself to write and I stay focused I moves along at a pretty descent pace for someone with no training, but I’ve also found the opposite. If I skip a day it can easily become two or three days. The more days skipped the harder it is to get motivated.
The other issues I’m finding is I’m a night owl. I prefer to stay up late an sleep in. I choose 9:00 pm until I finish as my writing time and at first it was great. By the time I finished my 1,000 ish words for the night I was wiped out mentally and ready for bed. What I didn’t expect is my mind is like a muscle and once I started working it nightly it got stronger and so after getting the 1,000 words down for three of four weeks instead of mental fatigue I would lay down for bed and my mind was still working on the story and not allowing me to rest. Since I have a day job I needed to get up for work and found many nights I was getting less than five hours of sleep and making me fell like crap.
The past week I’ve found it nearly impossible to make it through a night of sleep. Even after going to bed at nine o’clock one evening with my alarm set for seven thirty the next morning, I only made it until two before something inside woke me up and wouldn’t allow for rest. After three hours of browsing the beast I call the internet I finally felt my eyes where heavy enough to find rest and I managed a 3 hour nap before I pulled myself from bed.
Now that I’ve poured out my guilty confession of lazy writing I plan to attempt to focus and get my writing going tonight. Hopefully I’ll report back next week with 10,000 more words on novel two.
Guess I should get to it, because I feel the lead sand from the Sandman’s dusting already taking hold tonight.
