The daily writer’s kick in the nads

I had a good day yes­ter­day. I had a great day, yes­ter­day, really. I added 4,310 words to Rev­e­la­tion, bring­ing the total to 32,000 even. Last night I went home, yam­mered on the phone to my writ­ing part­ner for a while, and then watched NCIS and NCIS: Los Ange­les with the com­plete and utter aban­don of some­one who demol­ished their word count goal for the day.

And then, this morn­ing, I got kicked in the nads.

I get kicked in the nads every morn­ing. Because every morn­ing, no mat­ter how well or how poorly I did the day before, I start at zero again. My word count today is zero, at least so far (it’s early still). So as great as I felt about myself yes­ter­day, today I’ve got to start push­ing that stu­pid boul­der up the hill again.

And yet, days like yes­ter­day show me that it’s not so bad, this daily kick in the nads. All I need to stay on sched­ule today is 2,000 words, and I did over twice that yes­ter­day. And I did that with­out get­ting up early and writ­ing for an hour before work, and I did it with­out tak­ing my lap­top to Chipo­tle for lunch. I’m become adept at squeez­ing the words out of the slack spots in my day, find­ing time to write wher­ever and when­ever I can get it.

And this is the habit that I’ll take out of this year’s NaNoW­riMo, the habit that will enable me to write this seven-​book series in a year. Just like my plot and char­ac­ters have turned out dif­fer­ent than I thought, the writ­ing habits I’m devel­op­ing are dif­fer­ent than what I expected. I intended to instill in myself a “get up at 6 and get the writ­ing done, day in, day out” habit, but it turns out my life doesn’t work that way. My life is a chaotic jum­ble of so many things — hell, even my job in tech sup­port is basi­cally to be inter­rupted — and I sup­pose it fits that my writ­ing habit would develop as a way to jam lit­tle chunks of writ­ing into that chaos any way I can. To get the words in dribs and drabs if need be, but get them. 200 – 300 words here and there adds up.

Just so I can get kicked in the nads again tomorrow.