THE NEXT THING

Sunday afternoon, sitting in the sun in Sarah’s backyard for our final (for now) meeting of our book club, it was my turn to respond to the beginning session prompt. We start our sessions by going around the circle and asking how are we feeling, stating our names and saying what we are thinking about this week. My answer was that I was currently feeling nothing and that I was/am thinking a lot about what’s the next thing? A few weeks ago I down loaded and printed out Jumpstart Your Writing in Six Steps from Alice Bradley and it’s just been sitting untouched on my desk between a paper on 3D CLEM and a book someone lent me on making miso.

Monday morning, the dentist installed my permanent crowns which are so much better than the temporary ones I had to wear. This made me a little late to work and just late enough getting home for Josephine to pee and poop on my bed. I don’t know why she chose the bed. Panic? Revenge? This is probably the second accident she’s had in the house since she was potty trained (and that time at Deborah’s house where I was paying attention to her cues and she tried to poop under the Christmas tree). Everything including the mattress protector had to come off my bed and go into the wash. I took advantage of the situation and rotated my mattress all by myself and when I told Michael what I had done, he said “You’re the strongest person I know.”

I replied “That’s probably true.”

I am the strongest person he knows who cannot manage to finish even a shitty first draft of a writing project. I’ve woken up twice in the past three weeks from dreams that could be woven into frivolously fun romance books and each time I’ve failed to write any thing down. My brain wants me to write. My fingers do not want to have any thing to do with translating what my brain has to say. And I don’t know why I dance around and name this something other than what it really is. It’s like my own personal Voldemort.

And I'm writing a novel because it's never been done before - Father John Misty

I am writing a book. I am going to write a book. It might be one of the fifteen I have already started, but I am doing it. I haven’t figured out when or made up any kind of writing schedule but three days ago, I thought about buying some 3x5 notecards for organizing an outline. That’s a start, right? Yes…I know. Starting doesn’t seem to be the problem. Stamina and focus on the other hand are places where I could use some work. Are there notecards for that? Oh, wait a minute. I’ve been blogging for twenty three years. Consistently. Okay, maybe there were some weeks here and there when I didn’t update the blog, but I think of those as vacation weeks. We all need a break form time to time. But if I dissect my consistency in blogging, I can see that I am writing a little over five hundred words two to three times a week. That is almost 1,500 words a week. The average adult fiction book contains 70,000 to 150,000 words.

I need 100 weeks to write a shitty first draft.