The Power Of Chuck Wendig Commands Me To Write!

He did, really! It was like a voice from Heaven, only it sounded a lot like Animal from the Muppets.

See: NSFW Link Here

I was trying to figure out what I might write about today since the four or five top ideas I had for today are still really draft-ish and require a couple of hours to finish and I’m really tired and I got sucked into watching the hockey game and I don’t really feel like writing now so I saw the link come up on the new blog post on Chuck Wendig’s “Terribleminds” blog and I read it every day so I figured that was a good way to kill time and not be writing and then I read item Number One on the list and then I read item Number Two on the list…

Chuck scares me. So I stopped reading and started writing this.

Actually, one of the other ideas I had kicking around in my head in the middle of the night was that it was time to go to Phase Two of this blog thing and I should write a blog entry about it and that idea dovetails nicely in with Chuck’s threats and bullying sage wisdom and advice. It may not be a burning bush, but it’s pretty close, especially for a card-carrying atheist.

See, here’s the thing. I like to write and I think I’m pretty good at it at an amateur level and I’ve always really wanted to be a pro writer and I get the whole thing about needing to SHUT UP AND DO THE ACTUAL WRITING. The usual excuse for the past forever has been a lack of time, but with my current “employment situation” it would seem that there was a window of time available. But I realized in late April that I really wasn’t taking advantage of that window, so as a way to jump start the process I started this blog.

Now I’ve written something (and I’m having a great time doing it) every day for over seven weeks. I’ve even made a point to write and post something every day when we were traipsing around the country and being busy, busy, busy. I’ve gotten at least a small measure of that “writing discipline” that I was looking for.

(At least I think I have. In that respect, it should be noted that in the pursuit of this “writing” thing I’m probably 100% as clueless and aimlessly wandering as I often feel in the whole “finding a new job” thing, but that rabbit hole gets really deep and self-referential and quite likely pointless, so let’s not go there.)

The past two years I’ve participated in the National Novel Writing Month exercise and gotten some good ideas going. Now they need to be finished, and edited, and re-written. I’ve got notes jotted down for short story ideas going back for years – I’m good at keeping the notes and even adding to them over time, but now it’s time to write the stories.

So now, while I won’t be stopping this blog or my daily posts here at all (still fun, still a source of discipline), it’s time to adjust course just a little bit. I must start writing my “real” stuff first every day and only when I’ve hit my word count on that front come here and “play”. Yeah, that sounds like a good plan!

So my daily posts here may be shorter on some days and there may will be days when I don’t post much at all, expect maybe an update on the word count. Or a brief excerpt from a very early draft. Or a scene from a later draft that I’m really pleased with. Or a quick picture. Or something.

If I’m not doing that, if I’m not keeping you (and the world) up to date on how the “good” writing is going (no matter how horribly the “good” writing might be going), feel free to nudge me, bug me, politely inquire, drop a dime on me with my recovering Catholic guilt complex. I’ll appreciate it in the end.

OK, Mr. Wendig, now can I read items Number Three through Number Fifty?