Friday, May 30, 2025
Writing Requires Discipline— Or at least a solid excuse
Well in today’s world, the paper is most likely a blinking cursor in an empty text file, but the sentiment is the same.
So, how do I deal with this?
Easy.
Like any good writer, I procrastinate.
You see, I’ve been so tied up trying to figure out ways to market my first book, Tears of the Phoenix: Prophecies that I have told myself I didn’t have time to write. But that needed to change.
You see I usually get a majority of my writing done in the summer months, and if I want to even try to get the sequel to “Tears” out anytime soon, I’d better stop procrastinating and get to work.
Since I had the week following Memorial Day off, I figured it would be a perfect time to kick-off my summer writing season. I planned to spend every afternoon writing.
But as poet and fellow writer Robert Burns so eloquently put it, “the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.”
It’s not like people and events were conspiring to keep me away from the keyboard or the pad and paper I often use to write my first-drafts. It’s just that I kept finding excuses and other things I needed to do first:
I needed to create an author’s website. (I did and you can find it here)
I needed to setup an account on Instagram to start promoting my book there. (I did that too and you can follow it
here)
I need to create an AI-prompt to come up with a social-media marketing plan for me, so I know what to post on those sites. Then after that, I needed to create the posts and videos it suggested. (I’m still trying to figure out how to get either ChatGPT and/or Google Gemini to actually generate the complete post including pictures and hashtags then schedule them to go up automatically, but that’s a topic for another blog).
And let’s not forget about taking my daily walk and doing the chores I’ve been putting off for months as well.
Well toward the end of the week, I started to run out of excuses and did actually sit down and began working on my sequel novel again.
But it really was slow going. I spent the better part of three afternoons staring at my first draft and maybe only getting out 1,000 words. And most of that was a re-write of what I had already written.
But at least this new section is beginning to point me in a new direction and connect what until now had been a few scattered scenes into the beginnings of a coherent story.
I know that like anything else, writing is a habit as much as a skill, and the more I do it, the easier it will become. And I’m hoping that by the end of the summer I will at least have half the story done, because it’s really hard to write when all that blood gets in your eyes.
I remember a quote in college that said, "A blank page is G-d's way of saying it's not easy to be G-d."
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