missy whiny butt

Couple days ago was writing huge copious amounts (7300 word days, stuff like that) and said god how she wished she knew she could turn that on, since there were a hell of a lot of days where a thousand words was like pulling teeth. And right now I’m sitting here at Nook listening to Bon Jovi and not starting words on HoCH, which is the project du jour. I literally stopped mid-sentence yesterday. I have a pretty good idea of how the sentence ends. But I’ve been dicking around for just about 45 minutes now, because I don’t want to get started.

Butt In Chair is the hard part of writing, much like getting to the gym is the hard part of exercising. I’ve gotten pretty good at getting the ol’ butt in the chair. God knows why I’ve put up a block against actually starting the damned words, but I have. I suppose it’s because it’s committment. If I just keep dicking around, maybe I don’t *have* to do 5000 words today. Maybe a meteor will strike me or maybe I’ll win the lottery or maybe, hell, I don’t know what I expect, since I know that in the end I’m going to have to write the words anyway.

Friend of ours, a potter, tricks herself into working by saying, “Well, okay, all you have to do today is go out and put the handles on those coffee cups,” and so she’ll go do that, and while she’s there, well, might as well do those plates…

I do something similar a lot of the time, but it doesn’t work when I’m doing something like this 20 page challenge. The challenge means I can’t say, “Well, just a hundred words and you don’t have to do anymore if you don’t feel like it,” ’cause that’s about 4900 words short of the stated goal. But I’ll do this kind of crap even when I’m not doing a big challenge, which is why I put myself up to it in the first place.

(Part of my problem this morning may be that it actually came home to me that 20 pages a day for 10 days is FIFTY THOUSAND WORDS. I mean, I knew that on some vague intellectual level, but for some reason it actually *struck* me this morning, and damn, that sounded like a lot. No wonder said this would otherwise be known as the “Nanowrimo Is For Wimps!” challenge. I hadn’t quite wrapped my brain around what that meant…O.O)

The especially annoying thing is that most (not all, but most) of the time, once I actually get started, it’s really not so bad. I don’t struggle especially badly to get the words down, and if I don’t know what scene comes next I can get up and walk around a little while I think about it, and then I go back and make myself sit down again whether I’ve got it figured out or not, and usually something comes to me. It takes five or six hours to get 5K (I’ve been working, more or less, from 10 to 4 or maybe 5, with time taken out to eat and walk the dog and dick around online a little), which really isn’t that bad.

And now it’s an hour since I first sat down to write, and I’ve listened to most of Have A Nice Day, and seen Ted off to take his driver’s license test, and it’s time to stop fucking around and go to work.