I used to be shy about the thing I wanted to do in life but I’m not anymore. The thing I hope to do in life is write a book. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do but something I never shared out loud. Because sharing it out loud would mean I’d have to try and do it and actually doing it scared the crap out of me. I don’t know why but it did. What is it about creative pursuits that make them so scary? I’m sure if I muse around enough I’ll come up with the answer to that question but not today. I don’t feel like it. Instead I want to talk about the two things I need to do to get me closer to my goal of writing a book.
The first thing, oddly enough, is that I came to terms with the day job. Working full time is a necessity of life. But turning your job into something you do for mere survival, which is how I often see my full-time job as a paralegal, turns work into drudgery and daily drudgery is the main ingredient for full time misery. In the past several months I’ve made an effort to embrace the work I do full time and really care about it, rather than see it as something that I need to do simply for the paycheck. And you know what happened? I found that I felt like writing more! You want to know why? Because creativity lives in the soul. Full time misery caused by daily drudgery sucks the soul. And a sucked soul is bad if you want to write.
Once I got busy at work and my soul in order I moved on to the next thing which was to establish a regular writing habit. Remember back in November when I did NaNoWriMo? The goal was to end up with a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. I didn’t make it but I did end up with a 26,000 word novella. More importantly I got into the habit of writing daily. For a while at least. I’ll admit that the writing marathon of NaNoWriMo burnt me out a bit so I had to take a break. During that time I read lot of books on the Victorian era am am ready to start my next project. The subject: an historical romance about a feisty spinster who runs a home for wayward girls.
Now then, how about that book?