03DEC2020

I’ve finished the first draft of my first crime fiction story. I’m pretty excited to be done. In the words of Dorothy Parker, “I hate writing, I love having written.” Sometimes the physical act of writing seems daunting and overwhelming, mainly because we can put so much pressure on ourselves either because we expect perfection or because we worry that we’re actually worse writers than we think we are, but that feeling of knowing you’ve completed your writing goal for the day will keep you on a positive note for the rest of the day.

I’m going to need to do a little bit of editing before this story can get posted. It’s not incredibly long by any means, maybe 15,000 words. I don’t want people to read it while I’m sure there are numerous basic errors in there. Plus, there’s some technical aspects to it I need to go over to ensure I have them right. Being my first attempt at crime fiction, it’ll be interesting to see if I managed to hit the genre well enough or if I need to focus on writing other things but I’d never know if I didn’t give it a go. Maybe it’ll be good, surely I’ll need more practice. Either way, I’m happy to have completed the first draft. All my documents for it are stored on a cloud server so I can edit them from anywhere. I’ve really wanted to post some short story content on here and I haven’t in a while so I’m excited to finish this one.

I still need to edit Sirens, but I keep putting that one off for some reason. I need to get more disciplined with that. I tend to chalk it up to the new schedule I’m working this year which I haven’t completed adjusted with regards to being disciplined in establishing a routine. Last year, on a different schedule, I had a routine down that I did every single day. I woke up, had coffee, wrote for at least an hour, went to the gym, and immediately went to work. This year, do to a longer daily shift, I have less time outside of work on my workdays but I have more days off. With the actual days off, since I work nights, I have obligations that need to happen during the day and by the time the night rolls around when I’m still awake due to my schedule, I find myself lacking in my discipline and I don’t stick to that routine like I should.

I have been more motivated to read and write lately. I’m not entirely sure why but I’ve just felt that itch. Maybe it’s because I’m so closed to finishing this story or because I have the second edit of my novel just waiting for me to finish before I can publish it. I need to muzzle the little editor/naysayer in my head and let the work get out there. If Stephen King let that editor/naysayer win, we may never have had such great stories as The Shining, Shawshank Redemption, or Stand By Me. Plus, especially nowadays, the only ways to make money as a story writer are either writing NYT best-sellers or writing prolifically. I’m going to focus on the latter because that is something I can control. The NYT best-seller list is something I cannot.