And that's how you start writing

Stare stare stare at the screen, not an idea in my head to write about, not even a prompt because the wednesday prompts have ended and they haven't created events for the new year not that I could attend them anyway since I'll be taking classes with Dennett the man and they're on wednesdays too soo no good there. Still, I should find a creative group to hang with to write to embrace my artistic side, to just keep around an hour or so maybe two hours a week to do nothing but write and inspire, write and inspire. Maybe that's what I should do with SS and the gang, we'll see how it goes they are a creative bunch but it's unclear if they need that much of a push. Like I do because folks I do need some serious impetus to start writing a lot. Like yeah I've been writing a bit as of late but that's only and only because I've developed a habit. Look at me for the last few days when my writing habit was lost because and hear me through this folks, my writing habit was lost because goddamn because I was too busy socializing not that people even demanded my time in fact they were quite happy with me taking some time to write and be creative but I said nooo I just wanted to spend more time with them which is such bullshit because if I'd just maintained some good discipline I wouldn't be tryina play catch like I'm doing right now and the quality of the posts wouldn't be in the gutter as it be now. Not that I'm doing this for the quality anyway but still after a certain time and after you've written a certain number of words (which in my case is maybe half a million words over last year?) you start expecting better out of yourself, you've had so much practice so the expectation to have improved is only too fair.

So, the work writing is very close to a hundred-thou words, and I've definitely done more than four times that much writing in my free time here, so I've got a solid halfmil words just in the last year. Which is an incredible achievement, by far this year has been the most productive word in terms of how many words I've written. I'll be the first one to admit it may not be true quality wise but someone who's just learned to play a game and got lucky the first few times thanks to beginner's luck does not complain about not matching the original performance -- they just keep playing and practicing and learning tricks of the trade and just improving and practicing until they get better, you know? That's all there is, to write and write and write, to improve writing, and just keep writing. That's all there is man. You think it would improve research and talking to people and all that planning and plotting and the real stuff and yeah you need that once you are somewhere but if your fundamental problem is that you just can't make yourself write, all those tricks are going to be no good, on the contrary they will work against you since you'll spend so much time working them out avoiding doing the actual writing because you know your writing is going to be crap and you don't have any ideas and it's a scary prospect oh god oh dear gods all the gods I'd rather be doing anything whatever it is than actual writing and that's how you end up as a pretend writer someone who's posing to be a writer than someone who actually writes-writes. You know?

And finally. What when the habit is lost for weeks at a time. How do you come back? How do you recover? By not letting yourself go. By reminding yourself how bad it was when you were trying to recover how much of your life you lost doing it how friends got mad at you how family was disappointed you since all you were doing was writing and reminding yourself that the easiest way to do all the writing accomplished is to live by the schedule instead of playing catchup. Just man up (or woman up as your case may be) and write. Just write dammit, write like you're a sonofabitch write write write.

And that's how you become a writer. I think.