Happy 2022 everyone! I know, I am late to the party. I should have written this weeks ago. I seriously doubt anyone will care about my tardiness anyhow. Anyway, we completely missed midnight. In fact, the family and I crashed before we could see 2021’s last seconds tick by. Oh well! It's the New year, and I am pleased to report a serious uptick in my progress for book 2, Forgotten Fathers, and beyond.
For this year, I have made a few resolutions. Yes! I did it. I made one. Resolutions are silly, but I felt like taking a whack at it for a change. And in my kind of overdoing it fashion, I have made not one resolution, but three. The first one has to do financials, which I won’t get into much at all. I just have some personal milestones I would like my family and I to reach by the end of the year. No need to go into detail with you all here. The second is reading a minimum of 20 minutes per day. Finally, the third one is to write a minimum of 100 words every single day until I can write the words, “THE END” at the end of my scheduled five book series! Pretty lofty goals, am I right? Especially that last one. I am definitely in it for the long haul, as they say.
So, I am going to skip over the money talk, respectfully. I am NOT a financial advisor, nor an expert on money. So writing about it in any specific means in my opinion is a no no for me. I have, however, read a couple of books recently that opened my eyes to habits and good milestones to aim for with my family in the coming years. Plural, years. That's it. So that’s all for resolution number one.
Resolution number two is to read twenty minutes per day. This habit I started doing mid last year and found it incredibly helpful while writing my story. I stopped at about thirty days in, but It was so wonderful that I decided to reinstate the habit. It brought new words to light. I read new perspectives, new ideas, new subject matters. In my opinion, making me a better writer altogether. I’ve said that artists inspire artists. I wholly believe this. I know for a fact that I as a writer would not be where I am today, possibly not at all without the works of so many before me. Just to name a few; Tolkien, Patrick Rothfuss, Rowling, King, Cormac McCarthy, and SO many others. I read an incredible breath of genres. I don’t limit myself to the one genre I am currently writing for. I believe that life itself is full of “genres”. I don’t write that way. Yes, I am in a category of sorts with my books. But I pull from so many other sources. Both fiction and nonfiction. I feel as if we were to box ourselves into one area forever and we would miss out on so much greatness. So much beauty. Imagine if you will, living in one place your entire life, never traveling, never even exposing yourself to other people or lands. Never seeing pictures of different places, or driving the dusty back roads of those less traveled. I can’t and won’t do that to myself, I won’t do that to my stories, and I won’t do that to my readers. That is all for that one. Now for round three!
My third, and most impactful resolution deals with keeping up with a habit I began and completed last year. In fact, I wrote on this very subject in this very blog. So I apologize if I repeat anything. Get over it, this place is mine. My precious. Ha!(I love LOTR. NOT sorry). But I digress. The habit I am referring to is the one where I wrote 100 words for 100 days straight. It was wonderful. In that span of time of over three months I wrote another 40,000 words. WOW, right? That’s what I said. And then for some reason, at the end I marveled at my progress and then for no apparent reason at all, just stopped writing. I completely halted. I went from making incredible progress to nothing. Dead stop. Fall over, deceased. Chain me up, strap me to a board. Arrested for negligence. Stopped! Why?
I believe this one has to do with a law that dear Isaac Newton professed. An object in motion stays in motion. And if you have studied physics in any capacity at all(I have sort of). Then you know that the amount of energy to start something is greater than to keep an object moving that already has momentum. The same goes for diet and exercise, but please one elephant in the room at a time. I’m only one person. Large herbivores in small spaces aside, I threw myself into my work around Thanksgiving time. Oddly enough, at the same time I switched jobs(Yay me!) Sorry, off topic, again. At that moment, I sat down and told myself “Self. You are going to sit in this ungodly uncomfortable chair until you write 100 freaking words”(I didn’t say freaking). So I grumbled and whined to myself, scrolled through YouTube and came across some ambient music. Lord of the Rings music, no doubt. Turned it on, and lost myself in my imagination.
Once I embraced the “Zone” I breathed it in, and became completely infatuated with it. Drunk off of creating again. Inebriated and wonderfully distracted with characters and their plots. The world of Ruxar was reborn again in my mind. And ever since, even with work, and family, and general tiredness that comes with living, I have been writing like a bandit(can bandits write? I bet they wouldn't steal stuff if they could write better. Sorry. Lost myself again.), and that's when I realized that, like the iconic pink energizer bunny, I just have to keep going and going and going until I have no more story to tell. Which for me means writing until I can type the words, “THE END” at the end of book five.
Yikes! You say. How will I do that? Don’t you have to edit each book as you complete it? Why yes, yes I do. So with that, I plan on just adding to my daily habit. I will add, edit one to two chapters a day while still writing the story. This will not only ensure my momentum stays constant ,but continuity between the books will be seamless. Overall, making the story even better in the end. So for now, I raise the glass that I should have raised on New years, today the 16th of January, and wish you all a Happy New Year, and a hearty “Good Luck” with your resolutions and in general making this year a great one. Take care, and keep reading.
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