Slow and Steady

I’ll admit it: I haven’t been keeping up on my end of the resolution I made in January. One post a week. Is that really so hard? A well thought out post requires at most an hour of my time (maybe it takes less for other people, but I tend to rant a lot and then have to pare it down and clarify when my brain went off on a tangent). Clearly, I need to put forth a little more effort on that front. It’s not for lack of posting topics. It’s for lack of ambition. The weather is changing and I am all about sloughing off responsibility.

We just had our first taste of weather over 50 degrees this last weekend. It was well overdue. I’ve been waiting for this day since our second bout of -40 wind chills in January. I patiently waited through February…and then hoped all through March that Wisconsin would see a warm up of above 32 degree weather. It didn’t.  I suppose that doesn’t really support my weather changing laziness theory. Okay…um…

I have been busy with some spring cleaning. The underside of my bed saw some reorganization, as did my book shelf (I still really want to take the time to categorize what I own and analyze my reading habits. I have a theory that I own more books written by men than I have written by women. I’ve come to that conclusion based on my own list of books that I love and who wrote them. Honestly, the top several slots are written by men. It might have something to do with my preferred genre being scifi/fantasy. In any case, it’s a post for another day).

I’ve been invited out to the rock climbing gym a lot more as of late. As I’m typically a bit lazy and don’t expend a lot of energy in my day to day life one hour of climbing does tend to leave me completely worn out. Worn out means I have the rest of the day to write… and I do nothing because I somehow find myself sitting with my dog and the next thing I know I’m out like a light. I gotta start getting outside more, becoming more active, y’know… all that exercising stuff that’s good for people. I’m sure if I did it more often I’d have more energy, not less. And with the weather change I’ve got a hankering to be outside running around. It’s the whole taste of freedom thing. I know summer is right around the corner. A time when I can go inside and outside as often as I want and not worry about dressing accordingly.

Things haven’t been all procrastination, however. I’ve slowly but surely been getting writing done. At the current pace I may have a finished draft of a short story by the end of the school year. I’m praying that won’t be the case, and in all honesty I’ve put forth a lot more effort in the past week or so. I even wrote some tonight. I know, on a school night after my brain was fried by work, what are the odds? I’m hoping to discipline myself a bit more and start spending more nights writing for at least an hour. That would definitely increase the output. While my output hasn’t been very high, I have mentally plotted out a lot of edits for my rewrite. I just have to take the time to do them. And then I start back at square one and edit again, because no lie some of what I’m putting out is a little rough.

The writing process is just that: a process. Write and repeat. I’m excited for a time when I write…and then I can feel confident enough to hand it over to someone else to read and give feedback… so I can write and repeat. It feels like a never ending cycle…kind of like the way the weather keeps yo-yoing back down to the 30s and up to the high 40s. Who out there is experiencing consistency, whether it be in their writing habits or weather patterns?