Day 28 and discipline

Another good writing day. For day 28 of my delayed unofficial participation in National Novel Writing Month, I got up at 6:30 and got a good two hours of writing in — after I read J.A. Konrath’s latest post on his A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing blog, but more on that later.

I’m writing a new section at the beginning of the novel and the words and description are flying along. It feels good. Writing is definitely easier than rewriting, and I can feel that what I’ve done this morning will be too wordy, but that’s ok. I’m getting down the ideas as it’s a first draft of the chapter, and I’ll edit and tweak later. This new chapter has two parts and I’ve done one. By Sunday, I want to have the second part finished too — a small new goal, inspired by that blog post I was reading.

Yep, dreary eyed, I dragged myself out of bed in the dark, sat in front of my computer, which was still on and in sleep mode, and noticed my iGoogle page was showing on the screen. Even though I knew I had dragged myself out of my warm bed to write, I couldn’t resist easing into it by first reading Konrath’s most recent blog post (I subscribe to his blog via RSS on my iGoogle page). Funnily enough, his post was about Discipline! Yes, that’s right, the kind of discipline that drags you out of bed when it’s still dark, plops you in front of your computer and makes you start writing — oops! So, after I read that, I immediately started writing. 🙂

But the post is good advice for all writers who want to succeed. Many people start novels, but not many actually finish one. And then there’s the revising and finding an agent/editor and promoting it… Konrath offers up five things to do to be successful, many of which I’ve talked about on this blog. But these are things Konrath did to become successful. Read it for yourself.

Got any tips you’d like to share? How are you on discipline?

Write On!