Here I am, again

I would like to make a confession here: I almost forgot to blog tonight. I got home from a holiday cookout about six o’clock and just did not feel like writing, so I wandered downstairs and helped my son pack for a camping trip, made some dinner, and watched Resident Evil: Extinction. Blogspot just completely disappeared from short-term memory once I got to the lower level.

What is extra bad about this is I watched it on a high-def channel and used the DVR’s pause feature to catch the whole thing while I was in the kitchen cooking macaroni and cheese, all the while recording another movie for Scott and the kids to watch next weekend – this from someone who keeps campaigning to get rid of the DVR and the cable service and to stop stocking the pantry with complete junk food. Yeah, I fell way out of my ivory tower.

Then, I got caught up watching another movie, one I’d already seen. If Scott hadn’t gotten home in a timely manner from his visit with the Alabama contingent, I’d still be down there watching Bruce Willis save America from Timothy Olyphant and his evil computers. And that would be okay, if that was my intention for the evening. But my intention really is to write every single day, apparently about eleven o’clock at night, and post here.

Now that we are at five consecutive writing days, I am starting to feel some momentum. I still don’t really have anything coherent to write about – I just start to ramble as I sit here – but I’m feeling like I could do this again tomorrow. And the day after that. And the day after that. So far I’ve been able to write on three nights after work and two days after using up the whole day doing activities out of the house. What is going to be possible when I start opening up chunks of time my simplifying my personal commitments and house maintenance – as I plan to do as I work through the Zen Habits principles?

One of the reasons I got finished with NaNoWriMo last year was that I was able to take off the entire Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend to write. I woke up about nine, confirmed that everyone had eaten some sort of breakfast, then sat down in front of my computer, in my cute jammies, and started to write. I probably took a lunch break, I don’t think I did dinner, but I definitely wrote until after dark and I put 10,000 words down on the screen. I don’t think I could do that all the time, but what an amazing feeling to have done it then and to know that, having done it once, I can do it again. I’ll use another of my favorite examples: after I broke a board the first time, I never doubted that I could do it again. Sometimes I would miss and hit it wrong and have to redo it, but I had done it before, I could do it again. And again. And again.

Here is to another good night. See you again tomorrow.

~Noelle 07/05/08