and focus on the Catbirds for the next hour, earn an x. Feeling a good energy today, perhaps it’s the full moon. Let’s do a huge sweep of the arm on everything else. Mind is jumpy that is fine, just bring it back. Yesterday I was able to state clearly to myself: what we are doing here is rewriting the book and we are on Chapter 1. Clarity is good but I do not want chronology to become a burden. I am not in it for speed, we did speed last time and we ended up with this current draft,…

despite not going straight in but looking at shoes and buying concert tickets first instead. And despite all the distractions I came back and I picked up the thread of where I was yesterday and I wrote and I got a red x. And I think I would like to try to train myself a little in this. What if I had six hours? How much of it could I spend writing? The time constraint has been helpful in ways but what if I had six hours and also the discipline to use them? That would be amazing. That is…

Feeling like I can’t get anything done. Like even the red x’s aren’t enough. Like some people have published many things and I can’t publish one. (I saw a web ad for a new book by Kate Dicamillo, children’s book author, and my impression is: SHE’S prolific, and about my age, wtf, but I just googled her and she’s 52 and published her first book, by the looks of it, 16 years ago, so she was only three years younger than me when she started. So let’s calm down.) Part of this is because though yes I have accumulated three…

actually written. True, I sat with the energy of the book for a bit and that is something. What if I actually wrote some words? Let’s do the just-fucking-write thing where we write blindly and fast, it almost always nets something. Going going going in.

Last pomodoro of the morning, then I can be free. It is hard to re-enter. The inertia of all of those blank days with no x’s. Let’s start again. Get out the notes. Write 200 words on anything. One pomodoro earns the x. And then we can go outside.