I have broken the cycle. Ironically the birth of my second child, that's right a newborn in the house on top of all the rest, her arrival has helped me focus. Routine, structure, scheduling, rinse and repeat.
When you have a baby you suddenly lose all the enjoyments of being lazy anyway. TV, video games, going out with friends, all of that is restricted. So run with it. When the older child is off to bed and the baby is close to winding down before she goes to sleep, write. If she's in the swing or bouncy chair, have her do it in the office while you write. Don't sacrifice cuddle time but you can't and shouldn't hold a baby 24x7 anyway. That's when I write.
Generally I can get a good 30 minutes of hard writing done, if I am lucky an hour. If the baby wakes me up after 4am I get up for the day. Get her back to sleep, the wife is up getting ready for work. I slide downstairs, make a quick cup of coffee from my Kuerig, and write in the silent dark of the pre-dawn morning.
Now I am working in writing sessions at the office. Instead of eating lunch at my desk and browsing the web I will sneak off to a conference room and pound out a few hundred words. You know what? I am writing. I have several stories completed that I have set aside as I create new ones, then I go back and edit.
This blog I am putting out the exercises and tips that I have been told or read about for the rest to see and maybe use in your journey. I wish I could get 4 or 5 straight hours to pound out a few thousand words toward a novel but with a career, family, and everything else that comes with it that is very, very hard to come by. I am just making sure those are no longer excuses and it's working.
My goal is to bump up my daily targets to close to 1,000 words a day, no matter what it is. Although I am not sure blog entries should count, but putting words down in any format is still putting words down.
Now go write something.
Time to turn the page.
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