Fun Hater

I've got a counter thingamajig up! So you can now see I've written five pages...and I have a total of...well, five pages. Five pages is something to be proud of after such a long hiatus of not writing much. Truth be told, I could have written a lot more this past week. I had the time. However, I have a unique problem.

I don't like to have fun.

I feel guilty when I have fun. I feel like I'm missing some opportunity to get "one more thing done" or that I'm not fully utilizing my time. Mentally, I cannot calculate anything fun as also being productive and I am very quick to seek productive over fun. I'm always looking for the path of most resistance.

I don't like this approach to life. I don't think busyness and hard work must be synonymous with being miserable. I believe you can be a hard-working, contributing member of society and enjoy it.

I want to be a novelist. Novelists write novels. Thus, I must write. If I write, I am being productive towards my ultimate goal.

So this next week, I am going to work on removing this mental block and belief that my enjoying writing is a bad thing. Does anyone else experience this? What do you to get yourself to relax and enjoy a hobby and not feel guilt about the "should be's"?

I went on a morning hike and came across these beauties! Gorgeous. This has nothing to do with this blog post, I know, but I thought you might like this photo and a reminder to go enjoy the nice summer weather today.

The Opening Paragraph

So, this week I just wrote down ideas and thought about the kind of story I'd like to write. You would be impressed at how many preliminary ideas I wrote out.

I wrote everything out and realized, that yes indeed, I could write a novel out of this. I filled in holes and did some "sketches"...all that pre-writing project stuff you can do. I had a lot of fun, I was pleased to find my imagination does still exist. It might work a little slow and sometimes it doesn't give me fully formed thoughts, but I still get great stuff to work with.

Yesterday, I hit the point I couldn't do much pre-writing anymore and if I wanted a story I needed to start writing it.

This got me feeling a bit nervous. You know that horrible moment when you tell yourself you can easily improvise and wing a speech or performance. You have a little index card to go off of and figure you'll know what to say when the time comes. You get up...and you can't even remember your own name? Yeah...that's how I felt in front of my notebook paper.

Guess what though...I wrote my first page anyway. 

This was my first fictional writing in two years. I wrote it. It was simple.

I'll be upfront, it's not great. I'm definitely going back in to fix it, but I did have some good lines in there that I'll keep. It went well!

It's not much, but the fact I did it, it went well, and it wasn't a discouraging experience makes it a win in my book.

I'm writing again!

Life Upheaval!

Well, things have gotten a little crazy with more changes going on. We moved to a new apartment. I started my summer job. My one summer class is/was starting this week (yeah, going to college can be complicated sometimes.) In short...haven't been able to keep track of my notebook to start some novel writing.

I'm hoping next week once I get settled in to my new job, finish putting away boxes and figure out which section of my summer class I'm actually going to be in I can settle in to more writing. Right now though, I'm trying to cope with the pain that comes from being a full-time student, sitting over a desk 90% of your life to a job that requires standing for almost 8 hours a day.

So. Much. Pain.

It makes me feel like such a wuss. I used to work 10 hour shifts standing all but 30 minutes of that time...sometimes I did these shifts daily for 8 days in a row. It would be 45 minutes commute there and 45 minutes home again to sleep, wake up and do it again. Being a student has definitely softened a few muscles since those days.

However, I certainly do not aspire to be able to do that again. Impressive, yes. Healthy, no.

Anyway, blogging is happening, and more changes to the blog are coming. I think I'm going to add a counter of some sort counting how many pages a day I write. I'm so excited to write this novel...I have ideas coming together.

Now if I could just find my pen...