There's battle lines being drawn.
Nobody's right if everybody's wrong.
Young people speaking their minds
getting so much resistance from behind

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

The Pledge

Okay, sometimes you need to say these things out loud. Now that classes are wrapped up and I no longer have council work, it's time to get back to writing. This summer, I need to write.

(Picture me standing up, holding my right hand up in the Scouting Pledge manner)

To that end, I will get into work early so I can take a full hour lunch, over which I shall write more than just the blog posts. When I come home, I will sit at the table away from the TV and write. I will also exercise regularly, which will help with the focus and feeling better. I will watch less TV in a mindless manner and be more choosy about my time. I will spend more time doing "writerly" things instead (submitting, reading, research, writing exercises, and, you know, the actual writing, rewriting and editing).

To help with this, as you can see under WIPS & WHIPS, I've cleared out the old data and put the two books I will be working on (until one of them takes off to be completed first). The titles are working titles only.

I make this pledge in the open in the hopes that my deeply seated emotions of fear of disappointment and shame will now help drive me toward my goals.

3 comments:

Michelle Sagara said...

I wrote 5 novels (which were all published) on lunch hours.

Of course, this lead to the erroneous assumption that being at home full-time with a baby would be no problem *at all* when it came to meeting deadlines...

My process for this work (and it’s given purely as a “how it worked for me” and not strict advice) was this: I wrote for lunch hour. I spent rather longer than I would like writing the same four pages over and over again, because it took me time to find focus in an unfamiliar writing environment.

But my subconscious eventually rolled over and exposed its throat, and I found that after that, I got a lot done on those lunches.

Anonymous said...

Go get 'em, Steve.

Cath

Steve Buchheit said...

Hey Michelle, I did a lot of work on Bladesman over lunches. That, however, was at a different job where I had more privacy. At the current work situation I'm in the middle of the main aisle, so lots of people walking behind me and coming into my cube at anytime. So this one will be a little harder, but I want to make it work.

I have headphones attached to my computer so I can listen to audiobooks without disturbing everyone. Sometimes, however, I just put the headphones on and don't play anything. I have a feeling that's what I'll be doing over lunch.

Cath, thanks.