Scheduling difficulties.

This is probably the first week all year when I’ve been able to sit down and write every day, without something popping up at the last minute to screw up my schedule. I decided to celebrate by not actually writing anything today.

Not as much “celebrating” as “slacking,” then.

I’d like to blame the story (it’s moving along quite nicely, actually—just not in the direction I’d planned), but I think it’s just that I’m having difficulty getting back into the old routine. I’ve been trying to ease back into it, slowly increase my output each week until I’m back up to where I was last summer, but it hasn’t been working, simply due to the interruptions in my schedule. So I feel guilty because I’m not writing as much as I should be (never mind that I am writing), and that just makes it harder to write. Or easier to put off writing, which amounts to the same thing.

I didn’t have this problem during November. The first week or so was a bit rough, but once I got the story straight in my head, it was incredibly easy to get the words on the page. In October, I wrote 4500 words, total. By the end of November, I was writing about 3100 words a day. There’s no reason I can’t do the same thing now, now that my schedule’s back to something a little more sane.

I don’t have a strict deadline hanging over my head right now. And by the end of November, I was getting a little stressed, trying to make that sort of wordcount. So I might want to aim for something a bit lower. (Two thousand words a day feels perfectly reasonable.) But I think I’m done with this whole attempt to ease myself back into the routine.

I just have to sit down and do it. No excuses.