So, here I am, on the morning of April 30th sitting down to write my pages for my novel…and I open my iPad (which is what I write both my blogs and most of my novel writing), and it’s set on what I last wrote for my novel last night before I went to bed…and I realize that yesterday marks a first, you guys.
I didn’t write my blog last night. The first time in 913 days, I actually forgot to write it last night.
There is certainly part of me that feels embarrassed about that…that some sort of streak has been lost now, and I suppose it has been. But the reality of this blog, which began as a challenge to write a blog every day for 90 days…the reality is that the point has never been the consecutive “streak.” I’ve broken that numerous times already by writing past midnight, you know?
Still, I’m embarrassed because I forgot. I wrote my one page last night on my novel, it was all I could muster from a truly and deeply exhausting week, I read it to my wife, and then I passed out. I skipped over this ritual of writing *something* on my blog for the day, no matter how small.
So…and this is something I continue to learn as I move forward in the attempt to change my life…I move on. If I lose ground one day, I suck it up and make that ground up the next day. And here we are. It’s a new day. There are pavers outside my window shaking the ground and the walls of our apartment as the steamrollers grind past. I’m going to write a full days’ worth of pages, and then hopefully make up the 3 that I’m behind later in the afternoon (though I won’t hold my breath on that).
I also have to confess that my novel intimidates me now. I’m really diving in earlier than I ever thought, which to be clear I don’t regret for a second…but there’s a bit of terror I feel every time I sit down to write it because I have almost no idea WHAT I’m going to write. That’s been just fine so far, though…what I have will probably end up being heavily rewritten, but it’s already better than I thought it would be. Than I feared it would be. A book is always much worse in our heads, I think, than what it turns out to be once we actually sit down to write it. Much like this blog entry, which at first gave me this sick feeling in my stomach because it felt like a failure…
…but now it feels like just another blog post. Life happens. I will forget an entry again at some point in the future…maybe another 913 days from now…but the blog goes on. It does disappear in an angry poof. Nor does my desire to write it, and tell the truth.
The truth is that I have too much on my plate right now…but so far, I’ve kept a cool head, an eye on damage control, and had a lot of help from the Ho. She’s the best.
So, yeah…here’s to yesterday, and here’s to today. I’ll see you guys (again) tonight 😉