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?