Today I am trying to change my morning routine. Instead of my coffee in front of Facebook, or Gmail, I'm going to open up Blogger, or (Q10, my story writer of choice), and sit and write before I really do anything else.
Today being Saturday, E. and I have plans together: visiting his brother's family in Pickering. I'm not not looking forward to it but it's the lead-up to Shark Week and I'm feeling anti-social. The point I was going to make is that there is a far amount of stuff I need to do this morning, and all I really want to do is watch something mindless for half an hour while I drink my coffee and eat my breakfast, but instead, I am at the keyboard.
Maybe today won't meet my preliminary goal of 300 words. But it's the first step in establishing a habit (I hope).
Why 300 words? Well, as I pointed out yesterday, most successful authors have a daily goal. Every time I've set a daily goal it's been at NaNo levels or similiar, and that's just clearly not working. Even 1,000 words is not a lot, when I'm in the swing of things. But I tried Camp NaNo last month at 1,000 and it was a dismal failure. It got intimidating. Not on that first day, but the first couple of days I missed it wracked up swiftly and even swifter were the excuses not to tackle it. But 300 words? That's nothing. I've even set up a little app that tracks NaNo-style progress, and I set it at 9000 words for 30 days. I have no project in mind--I actually have a couple on the go--but it'll help the habit form. Next month, maybe I'll go up to 500 words, if I feel I can do it.
Not that blog posts are going to increase in size--I decided to count one reasonably-sized post as a "unit", regardless of what my daily total should be, since the blogging is less about word counts and more about willpower. Today I did one writing unit. I doubt I'll get any fiction done because of the visiting today, but I can take pride in this first step.
Happy Day Two: This is a bit harder to do in the morning, before anything has happened, and I don't know if it defeats the purpose to describe something from yesterday. So right this moment I'm feeling proud of my self for writing this post, and also very happy about my impending cup of coffee and little yogurt, because they've been sitting in front of me this whole time while I wrote, and if I wasn't going to enjoy them before, I am now.
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