2. Not only am I not motivated by money, I find money to be actually DEmotivating. 3. So, in this situation, what is motivating me to complete this work? Two motivational situations: what gets me to start, and what gets me to continue once I start. What gets me to start is the most mysterious/unpleasant. It is some sort of combination of fear/dread/shame/doom/not wanting to be flaky or let people down. What gets me to continue, once I’m in it, is the more or less happy hum of working with words. More specifically: I like to solve problems. More specifically:…

of writing, approximately. Reasons why it would behoove me to push through the fog and write 2000-ish words in the next 90 minutes: It’s going to be just me and the kids until I go to sleep tonight. Writing would give me a sense of accomplishment and allow me to play. Chapter 5 wants to be written. If I wrote 2000 words, I could tear off a link in the 24-link-construction-paper chain that I am thinking of making. One step at a time. Don’t get ahead of yourself. This is what we’re working on right now. Chapter 5, first part.…

what I want this morning. Is it to write? Lately it has been to aggressively waste time reading sensationalist news headlines on the Internet. Not sure if that’s not a waste of time, but a way of dealing. I just don’t know. What can I do? 1. Put 10 pieces of paper away in this office. 2. Open up Scrivener. 3. Sage the computer, the work, the office, and myself. 4. Commit to writing 500 words.

Distractions this morning, all internal. Not all caused by me, but now my responsibility. How do I deal with this? I need to set aside time that is not writing time to think (read: worry) about this, and act on its behalf. I have a plan for the worrisome thing: an email, a phone call, a punch list. Inhale. Exhale. Nothing will be set on fire today, and certainly not between now and 8:30 AM this morning. This email can be just as well written tonight.

in which to work today and I don’t have them. Will try to make the time that I do have count. I need to write the museum scene. Which is both easy and hard. Easy because I’ve written versions of it before and know approximately where to go, though this time is different. Hard because it feels like a really important scene and that means pressure, the issue of choking. Can we use a different word? What do I mean by that? What I mean by choking is that I suddenly won’t be able to do a thing I’ve assumed…

I didn’t write yesterday. I would like to write today though. I would like to carry on with the project. Thinking of it as a project is soothing to me. Just another project. Keep going like with anything. Try to keep the momentum going on it. Sometimes you lose momentum and that’s okay… it’s still a worthy project. I lost momentum on the book shelves in my office, but I still really really want them and believe they’re going to change everything. The word count is important. 2000 words is roughly 3 percent of the book. That is a visible…

Scared I’m not going to do it. Can we talk about this? Writing the 2000 words for the past few days… it’s been so good! It feels really good. Can we talk about what exactly feels good about it? K, so first, it’s a number. It’s a lot higher than anything we’ve ever shot for before, even during the brief flirtations we’ve done with NaNoWriMo. Achieving this number each day makes me feel like I ran about 6 miles in a nice steady rain. Virtuous. Clean. Calm. Productive. Like things are moving, and the motion is forward. But it’s not…

apparently in order to consume massive amounts of sugar and then give writing another shot for today. Feeling ready. Feeling better than I did this morning. (Sugar high?) Okay, so. Can we acknowledge for a moment the still not knowing what to do with this chapter? Can we just bushwhack through it please? Got some ideas, let’s go. Will report back.

Good question. Let’s act as if this is the thing we most want to be doing right now. Like, if you gave us an entire day, this is how we would spend the whole thing, seized by this project. This project has an end, and we can get to it. First this one thing, and then that other. Sometimes there are snags and you have to go back to Jo-ann or Home Depot for supplies. It happens. You run out of thread. Or nails. Or you break a board because you didn’t know you had to pre-drill. That sort of…

really worked for me today. It got me moving out of bed, because I knew that I needed to focus on it if it was going to happen. It kept me moving during the writing, I knew I didn’t have time to think about anything else or quick check email or that one thread on the forum. I let myself WANT it to happen, I let myself believe for a little while that I could do this every day and that I could have a whole novel (draft) in a month if I committed. I am scared to commit to…