The ants go marching...

...two by two!

Okay, this has nothing to do with my former adventures in pest control (summary of said adventures).  This actually deals more with personal desires.  They always say that you should set a time to do such and such and then stick to it!  Usually this involves exercise or daily devotions and usually they tell you to do that at 5 am or something similarly ridiculous. 

I have discovered that the morning was not made for me, but maybe its for all those type A go-getters out there in the world. I'm not type A.  I don't think I can even transform into a type A person if I wanted to.  I don't have that desire, so life is good.  That actually makes me think of this:


Yeah, that dude isn't going to make it!

I've tried doing the early morning thing, but my bed has this gravitational pull that is so strong that even if I do leave its comfort, my brain stays with it in spirit.  Ask my wife how responsive I am in the wee hours.  She asked me the other day what time I came back to bed after comforting our older daughter who decided to wake up crying, very early in the morning.  I don't recall even leaving our bedroom. 

So usually I scoff at this advice, but today I've decided to try it.  It won't be an early morning thing, because I want to write everyday and if I tried to demand that I write something first thing in the morning, my writing would be more incomprehensible than my two year-old's drawings. 

My goal is two sentences written or wrote, damn I hate verbs, by two in the afternoon.  2 x 2.   You might be thinking, Whoa, Bill, don't over do it!  And I might smirk at your smart-ass nature, and then explain to you that most days when I get over the blankness of the page and actually start writing, it just starts flowing and before I know it, a page is filled.  Much like this blog post that seems to be running on and on.  I started writing today at 1:48pm and haven't stopped and that was twenty minutes ago.  Its about momentum and I like it. 

So if you see me and its three o'clock in the afternoon, feel free to ask if I got my two in for the day!

The bug...

...that really isn't a bug.

I wrote yesterday and today.  I had to come up with a fictional movie in my work of fiction.  I named it the Metroplex of Doom.  I kind of wish it were a real movie.

The desert...

...and the itch!

I hate winter.  I actually dig the cooler weather.  I miss the snow here in Kansas, though when it does snow I miss having a dry driveway.  The thing that I hate about winter is the mental miasma I hit every winter.  There is a refreshing newness each spring which at some point begins to thaw my thoughts.  I begin to have hope and ideas renewed.

If I could bottle it I would, but of course if rainbows were just unicorns farting then we would see more single horned horses.

I want to write, yet I waste my time looking for some new toy, playing some stupid game, or mentally strangling some nuisance.  There are lots of ideas streaming through my head at any given moment but fear holds me back.  As I write this I want to delete it because it seems dull and uninteresting but I am thinking I need to post it just to get out of the rut of not writing.

I want to set goals to write and finish some stories, but I suck at goals and then I get distracted and it doesn't happen I feel bad and wished it was physically possible to kick my own butt.  So what do I do? How do I self-motivate when the voice of fear and procrastination scream louder than both my daughters combined?

I'll let you know when I finally figure out a way to scratch that itch....

Grogginess is catching...

...run fast!

Yeah, I am feeling completely uninspired to do anything.  I've yet to X off a single day since I set the goal last week and I think each day I don't do it adds another day's burden to my shoulders which inspires me to do it less and less out of condemnation and guilt.

It's a horrible downward spiral.  The question does need to be asked as to why I succeeded for so long last year when this year I seem to be having a hard time making it out of the starting gate. Could it be working two jobs while trying to have a relationship with my wife and daughter is too much for my brain to handle and laziness sets in too easy when I'm not having to do any of those things?  Or maybe the lack of confidence I have in my writing scares me toward inaction.

Maybe just having a 15 month old climbing all over me while I'm trying to write is more detrimental to my success than I might have originally guessed...tomorrow is a new day.

Paid Crastinator...

...that's when I'll know I'm a pro!

So yesterday I did one thing to further my goal of setting up goals for the year.  Ha.

I printed out a calender so I can X out the days when I accomplish my goal, but I never really set my goals.  And after much thought I've decided to take it easy and set two goals for daily improvement. 

1) Write one page of fiction or edit three pages of completed stories (I kinda stole this one from the author of the article that I got the idea from, and blogging doesn't count.  But it feels doable and I hopefully won't set myself up for failure.  And if I do write one page a day, I can easily knock out a book or two a year.)

2) Do something constructive at home.  (You might say that if I do number 1 at home then number 2 is done, but I mean something that betters the home, whether spraying weeds, mowing, raking leaves, trimming trees, doing dishes, taking out the trash, doing laundry, etc.  Most days, especially now that I'm working two jobs I get home and veg.  This isn't conducive to having a nice yard for my daughter to play in, or contributing to a clean house, which I prefer.)

There you go.  I think its manageable and it'll help me get closer to where I want to be in the future.  I do need to figure out what I'm going to do on sick days, or holiday and traveling days.  But maybe I should quit procrastinating and just go start writing.

Something like that...

...almost!

So last year I set the goal of writing more and it actually worked for a time being.  About 6 months.  Then life got busy chaotic with summer and bug collections across the western United States, and I broke the chain so to speak.  I've been struggling to re-motivate myself again.  I finished writing a book and then its sat.  and sat.  and sat some more.

In the meantime I've had about a dozen more story ideas.  I really wish I knew a ghost writer who could just take my ideas and create the stories, or a machine that could just read my thoughts and jot it all down.  But since neither of those is going to happen in the immediate future, I need to quit being lazy.

So tonight while taking a breather from playing with Charleigh I came across this article:

http://lifehacker.com/5886128/how-seinfelds-productivity-secret-fixed-my-procrastination-problem

Its a similar idea to what I did last year, but with a more long term view.  So beginning tomorrow I'm going to write it all out, and find me a calender to mark stuff off of.  I'm not seriously procrastinating on starting my new project, its just that its almost 10pm and I'm tired and have a 13 hour work day tomorrow.  Anyways, I'm excited to get back into the swing of things again.  I even started jotting down the major I ideas I have for the next book that I want to start writing.  Woo hoo.  And maybe on the days I don't write I can begin editing my book from last year so I can maybe start trying to get it published.