I did not manage a single writing sprint yesterday. Not one! Nor did I get my 1000 words done. I did write about 200, in bits and pieces, a sentence here and a sentence there. I also met with the flooring people, worked on picking out a new floor, scheduled car maintenance, went grocery shopping, made meatloaf and mashed cauliflower and asparagus for dinner, did a bunch of back-and-forth on new covers, plus about a half-dozen other things that have been needing to be done, so it wasn’t a wasted day by any means. But it wasn’t a day that included a single sustained writing burst. Something else always wound up taking priority.
I’m looking ahead into today and I already know a bunch of other things are going to be interrupting me. But I also know that’s no way to create a career as a writer. Writing has to become my priority–the first job done, the most important thing on my list–not the thing that I try to squeeze in around the edges of the rest of my day. That said, I’ve got a lot of things that I want to get done today, from figuring out why my Ghosts file isn’t working the way it ought to and uploading it to the smaller sites, to measuring rooms for the flooring, to working on the formatting of A Gift of Time, to yoga… yeah, there’s a lot I’d like to get done today.
I think my goal is one sustained writing sprint, offline, of at least 45 minutes with as many words as that gets me, and ideally breaking through my indecision about the current scene that I’m in and getting into the next scene. I don’t care how many words that takes me as long as tomorrow the story has moved to the Great Council. And now I’ll think about that while I walk the dogs and get the day officially started.