Not with a bang, of course, but with a whimper.

Ok so today is one of those days that I know the auspicious start of my writing would inevitably give way to. Even though I thought I left myself in a prime position to write this morning, I couldn’t seem to focus. Had a difficult morning with Sophia, where she pulled out every stalling tactic in the book and whined incessantly. I hit (and broke) the composter, which was very upsetting because I was so keen on figuring out how to use it, on the way out of the driveway and generally had a very frazzled morning. Thus, I couldn’t slow down enough to find the space to write like I wanted to. I was grateful when the phone rang and interrupted me from my miserable attempts, and have sought other procastinatory distractions as well. Checked my email (but didn’t answer it). Made myself a cup of tea. Upgraded some extensions on Firefox. As a result, the ending of “Loyal Companion” feels like it sucks. However, I wrote 544 words on it today and it is roughly finished, at 4483 words. Maybe tomorrow I will be able to reread it, revise it and be more satisfied with it. On the other hand, despite the downer of being unhappy with the story overall, there’s the bonus that I finished it. I wrote on it from beginning to end several days in a row. That’s worth something. I will spend the rest of my morning writing time here with you, probably grousing.

I think what might work for me is a list of writing related things to work on when I can’t actually concentrate enough to write. Research, character and plot outlines, working on the website, that kind of thing. At some point I’ll have enough things written that I can save the down days for revisions, I suppose, although it’s possible that revisions will require more concentration and be more taxing work than the writing itself is. We’ll see. It’s weird to think about revisions, because I’ve become used to the less than pristine writing of the blog. I try to make the copy as clean as possible for public consumption, but I never go back to something I wrote a week ago and revise it.

I’ve got a couple of writing concerns. One is that I’m not sure what I will work on next. I have a few ideas knocking around, but I think that in order to feed the stream of daily writing I might have to commit to one, and to do that any one of the vague ideas will have to be more fully fleshed out than they currently are. Two is that I’m trying to develop a habit here, so that I’m writing every day, but for three days next week during the Thanksgiving holiday, Sophia will be out of school, so my habit won’t be fully entrenched then and I might get derailed when I have to miss a few days. One and two could work together to thwart me, in fact, so I need to be careful. I’m also not sure yet how the weekends will be playing out, either. I don’t see a reason why I shouldn’t write then as well as the rest of the week, but I have required near total silence and stillness thus far, and that’s not going to happen over the weekend. There’s also lots of house stuff (cleaning, unpacking, putting away, shopping, etc.) that I’ve been relegating to “some time later” and if that some time later isn’t the weekend, I’m not sure when it would be. At any rate, if the weekends are non-writing time and Thanksgiving is a non-writing time, I’m going to be facing a lot of time off just when I need to be cracking down and being consistent.

I want to have a small collection of finished things before I go forward into the next step, which would be feeling out markets. I still don’t know how I feel about publication. For a long time I disavowed it, but now I’m not so sure that I wouldn’t like to try my voice in that venue. On the other hand, I don’t even know how to begin, and it all seems rather labyrinthine and intimidating. Still, worrying about that is all kinds of putting the cart in front of the horse, so I’m not even seriously looking that far ahead yet. I’m harboring a distant dream of having a nice chunk of something written to submit to Viable Paradise by January and possibly attend in 2005, but I don’t know if I’ve ever written anything that could be called science fiction, though I have wandered through the terrain of fantasy. Anyways, it’d be pretty cool, wouldn’t it?