Argh! The guilt!

Not writing. Not a word in weeks. It is not writer's block. It is just not writing.

A good friend of mine is an author. When I spoke with him about how I longed for solid periods of writing time he laughed. "You have to make time to write. And you have to write every spare chance you get. Even if it is just twenty minutes."

I know he is right, but it is so hard to do. A spare twenty minutes is so easily filled with some (any) other activity than writing.

Writing a novel means climbing a mountain of 100,000 words. When I wrote Eternal Knight I climbed that mountain at a pace of several thousand words per day. In fact, I climbed up and down every crag of that mountain multiple times and ended up with 250,000 words. Too much climbing!

A while back I wrote a post about writing 1,000 words a day. The mountain of my next novel would be climbed in 100 writing days (plus editing and revising time, of course). That didn't seem so bad. But I couldn't hit 1,000 words. I couldn't hit 500. And the mountain kept getting taller.

It isn't that the book is getting longer... I still have it planned for 100,000 words. It is just that the fewer the words I write per day, the longer it will take to hit 100,000. And the longer the final goal is from being achieved, the harder it is to motivate myself to write.

I must break this cycle. The book will not get done at all if I don't put pen on paper. My life is different from when I wrote Eternal Knight. I need to accept that fact, adjust, and get to work.