Yep, Still Here

I ran into a friend at work yesterday—a fellow writer in the off hours—who knew about my blog and asked me how how it was going. I told him that I hadn't done anything on it recently.

"What happened?" he asked.

"Life happened," I said.

He looked at me and shook his head. Not in sympathy, of course. No, he was showing his disappointment. And I completely, unequivocally deserved it.

Not that I haven't done any writing. In fact, I took one of the freewrites I started here and fleshed it out into a full story, which I then submitted to a journal. (Fingers crossed...) But, happy as I am to have accomplished that, I'm also aware that I have not done anything even close to daily writing. And that was the big goal.

So here I am again. I've decided to follow the advice of one of my many writing books and made a chart with my daily writing goals. I'm starting small—500 words per day. And until I decide which story to prepare for submission next, those 500 words may as well be freewriting.

Side note: I thought a lot about how to resume numbering my entries because of the gap in time since I last wrote. Do I continue numbering where I left off? (But that implies continuous writing.) Do I skip numbers for the days that I didn't write? (That would be so annoying to keep track of. And does that imply I've done MORE writing than I have because the number is higher? And what about the days that I wrote, but not in the blog?) It made my head spin. Of course then I realized that I shouldn't be wasting my time thinking about how to number these entries. It's just another way to give in to the procrastination. And with that, my decision was made. I will resume the count where I left off! (If you ever wanted to know how my brain worked, that's a small, scary peek into the abyss. You're welcome.)