Discipline

 Hello everyone!

I know you can't tell, but it took me three times up above to get hello spelled right. Sometimes the fingers don't work with the mind as well as they should.

In short, though, I'm a little out of practice in the whole writing thing. There was a time that every day was spent writing something. Now, not so much. I'm trying to get back in the habit, but find myself drifting away. A lot of times reading a book is a lot more interesting than writing a book, especially when it feels like no one really cares if I write one or not.

That's sort of a defeatist attitude and actually not at all why I write. Over the past couple of years, however, I've let life take me away from something I enjoy and that gives my miserable little life a little meaning beyond going to work and paying the bills.

Back in the newspaperman days, the sports reporter and me would make fun of anyone who would claim writer's block as an excuse for not writing. At that time, we did not have the luxury of writer's block - stories had to be reported and written on pretty tight deadlines. I was decent at it, too, if I can brag a little. I have awards, if you want to see them.

My first novel, Blind Man's Bluff, was written - for the most part - on my lunch hour during my first years as a journalist. At noon, I would take my notebook, and later a little word processing keyboard called an AlphaSmart, out on one of the grassy knolls around the Albuquerque Journal campus. I figured that if I could write and sell a novel, my life would be set. Well, I wrote it and no one seemed to care.

In hindsight, that make sense. While the story is good, the execution could have been a lot better. I tried to read it last week and some of the sentence structures made me cringe. Still, it's not a bad book and it would not hurt my feelings if any of you all clicked on the link above and spent the 99 cents to read it. Shoot, I'm guessing you spend more on coffee.

My second novel, a gripping time travel book called Time in the World, was written over the course of hundreds of late nights. I would go back into my little office at the house after dinner was cooked and eaten, the dishes done and the kids packed off to bed.

During the writing of my third novel, Welcome to Golden, I followed the same late night regime with a little early morning time thrown in for good measure.

I bring all this up because now I have a hard time staying awake to work at night and getting up early is never done on purpose. It's almost as if my work ethic has abandoned me. A more talented writer might claim writer's block, but I live with the guilt that I've just been lazy and uninterested in writing. I've been trying to get that spark back because I know that spending at least two hours out of 24 every day does wonders for my mental health.

And it's not as if I had nothing to write. I've been working on my current novel for at least five years. I had written nearly a third of it when I determined that I was taking the wrong approach and started over again. Now, I'm back to finishing a third of it. But I hadn't looked at it in nearly three weeks.

Here's a secret that really isn't a secret. In fact, if you were to pick up just about any book on how to write a novel there is a bit of advice that everyone agrees upon - if you want to be a writer you have to write. I know I've probably angered some folks who have come up to me and said, "You know, I've always wanted to write a book." As if it is something you just sit down and fire off in a single sitting.

Writing takes discipline. You have to do it every day. You want my advice on how to write a novel, just sit down and write a novel. Get up early, stay up late but do it. Even if you only write two pages a day, you will have a novel-length book in three months.

Do I sound like I'm trying to convince myself more than you? That isn't a mistake. I want to finish this project and I want to go on to the next one. I have at least four writing projects to get done. After four years of off-and-on activity, I'm needing to get back into the habit.

This morning was the first to get back into the groove, and, man, does that prose really suck. That's okay, though, because after the first draft is done comes the editing. And that's the part I really like.

Stay cool, my friends!