author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

On the train ride back from the World Horror Convention, I kept saying to myself, "Once I get back into town, I'll get back into a good working writing schedule." And then, "Once I take a day or two off, now that I'm back, just to recover from the trip, I'll get to work."

Which of course became, "Once the July 6 bout is behind me, and I'm on the train to New Orleans again, then I'll get some writing done for sure."

Partially, I blame the three weeks between trips for being sufficiently hectic to make me loathe to give up any scrap of down-time. Between some aggressive roller derby practice to prepare for the bout, and fulfulling other roller derby requirements to do with the committee I serve on, and day-to-day household things, and of course preparing for the next trip, I just felt like once I'd checked off the latest stressful item I deserved some hours of play. Or reading. Or sleep.

(Also, I was frantically knitting as much as my fingers could endure to finish my pink Bombshell derby socks. I cast 'em off on the morning of July 6 and did indeed wear them in the bout, earning a compliment from a knitting/spinnning friend in the audience and a tongue-in-cheek growl from a fellow league member who's learning to knit. But I think I'll be ripping back the cast-off and adding another couple inches to the K2P2 ribbing when I get a chance.)

But I think the larger problem is, I never sat down and said, "When I write today, this is what I want to work on." So instead of, say, taking fifteen minutes to freewrite here or half an hour to work on a story revision there, I sort of lived with this great hulking vague monster lurking in the shadows of every room, and it was called WRITING and I could not bring myself to deal with it.

This is an ongoing problem. Failure to define the task beyond "I must write today!" results in a tendency to let the day sort of aimlessly dribble away. I wish it were as simple, as it seems to be for some of my friends, as saying, "I need to write 1500 words every day." Maybe it would be, except that right now I don't so much need to write new words as I need to revise and submit what seems like an endless queue of story drafts. And "Revise a story" is just as threateningly vague. I suppose a better approach would be, "At X O'clock, fix Y specific problem in Z specific story".

(This is one thing that Morning Pages are good for. Except everytime I write in my Morning Pages that "Today, I will do XYZ," if I then don't do XYZ, it's another rock on the disappointment-and-self-loathing pile that gets harder to shift every day. But that's another problem entirely.)

So here I am, posting this from Chicago. Did I get some writing done on the train? Why, yes, thank you for asking. I put an Examiner post up--there it is!--and I spent fifteen minutes freewriting. Which isn't as much, I think, as I could do during an 18-hour train trip. But it's a start. The Chicago to New Orleans leg will assuredly see more progress along these lines.