Making Mountain From A Molehill

Summertime holidays make it harder to want to wake up early.  All this week, (month) I have struggled to wake up and get my mental gears moving.  I hit the snooze button at least three times before stumbling my guilty conscience into the kitchen. (I think the motivating factor for most of my actions is that guilt I lug around with me.  Is that a woman thing?  Or just a human thing?)

As a result, my production has gone waaaay down.  (Production signifies number of pages written.  Production does not necessarily reflect quality.  Production in no way establishes a concrete page count and even the best of witticisms cannot be relied upon to remain through to the finished draft.  However, Production is the easiest way for this author to gauge progress made.)

I am not the kind of author that requires myself to reach a certain word count before I can stop, or a certain number of pages.  I give myself a time limit.  (For example:  since I slept in an extra 30 minutes, I gave myself 45 minutes of writing time this morning.  That was all I could spare.)  However, I do like it when I write a page or more.  Then I feel the morning has been truly productive. (Read: Production + me = smiley face.)

I read once that it’s easier to keep a story alive than to try to resurrect one.  I guess that means that once you have breathed life into a story, it’s better to work on it a little each day than to leave it to starve for a few weeks before resuscitating it.  (I think that metaphor needs to be laid to rest.)  So, being true to that theory, I try to at least do something everyday, even if I end up deleting it all the next morning.

I suppose that, more than anything else, makes a book of what started out as an idea.  Those initial movie clips become full-length cinema gold after endless bleary-eyed mornings with me tapping out words on my laptop.  It all comes down to commitment.  Commitment to the story, or to writing, or to my unbreakable schedule, or just doggedly doing it because I said I would.  

Sometimes I do it because it’s fun.

And that, gentle readers, is how a person can go from having a notion to having a book.