Making Room

"They" say it takes twenty-one days to make a new habit. For that reason I'm going to take a little break from the blog world and make way for some better habits. Well, maybe just one -- working on this novel. It's not even that I blog that frequently or read others' blogs too obsessively. I was surprised to see that it's been almost a week since I posted something new here because I have a million things I want to write about. They are things I want to share, and they take up space in my brain -- space that right now should be hammering away at these characters and this plot. At the moment I don't have room for it all. And since working and writing and emailing and blogging and reading blogs and buying Christmas gifts and reading the news obsessively all take place on my computer, everything starts to run together into a jumbled mess. So I'm making way for more creative writing by temporarily avoiding blogging and blogs and my compulsive reading of the New York Times online.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, "they" say, and I'm feeling desperate. The new year is about seven weeks away and I don't want to get to January 1 without making some kind of progress on this book. I want to find some momentum sometime soon. Please. Oh please. I'm also feeling a tad, shall we say...convicted. And that rather uncomfortable feeling settled in for a visit after I read someone else's blog. That someone else is a writer (so different from me because he actually writes!) and on his blog he was reflecting on something he had written, noting that if he hadn't put time into writing it then it wouldn't exist. The gist was to consider what you're NOT doing. Your creative works won't be birthed without you, and the world could be missing out on something great and important.

This is not to say that what I am trying to write will be great or important. That's not the point. It's just that I'm the only one who can write this story.

And so we'll see if I can make some new and better writing habits in the next three weeks. Hopefully my next visit to this page will have some good news -- a post about success rather than failure. For the next three weeks I will miss writing the occasional blog post and I will miss reading your blogs, but I'll be back.

For now, I must depart. I hear an argument brewing in the house. One brother just said to another: "There are no words to express how annoying you are." This does not sound like the recipe for a smooth bedtime.