Tomorrow Arrives Three Days Later

Yes, readers, it took me three days to follow up on my last post. I apologize if you have been checking daily--or even hourly--to find out about my bad habits.

Well, this is one of them. Not posting daily, I mean. Bad Habit #1! I am trying, readers! Blogging is hard, especially when you don't have Internet service at home (though right now I do! Thank you, B's MacBook Pro!) and you work in a crap office like I do, with random people walking behind you and staring at your computer screen all day long. Bad Habit #1 can also be translated as "Not writing every day." That is definitely a bad habit. I remember saying at some point, probably at the start of the new year, when everything seems possible, that I was going to definitely, definitely, DEFINITELY write five pages of fiction per week. Five pages per week was nothing! It was going to be so easy! In fact, I could write five pages per week of fiction and also write a full-length play at the same time. Or a screenplay. A play or a screenplay, one of them, with all that writing time I would have freed up by writing just five pages of fiction per week. Also, five pages of fiction per week meant that I would definitely, definitely, DEFINITELY meet my Mildred challenge, which was, if you remember, and I'm sure you do, to write five new stories by the end of May 2010. Well, readers, I wrote five pages per week maybe the first two weeks of the year, but that was it. Was I lying about it on my blog? I might have been. I am afraid to go back and look. Please don't look, readers.

As an aside, or not, I have decided to keep the Mildred going until I finish five new stories. This means that I realize that I won't finish five stories by the end of May 2010--I am shooting for three stories now--but it also means that I think writing the Mildred is an important tool or method or (what's the word?) for completing my stories.

Another aside: while I was writing the above paragraphs, I interrupted myself twice, first to get some food, and second to get my checkbook, because I thought it would be a good time to pay my bills. This gets to Bad Habit #2: not blogging when I should be blogging, not writing when I should be writing. You will notice, as I have, that the bad habits that have been long established in my writing process have also become an integral part of my blogging process. Isn't that interesting--and instructive! That breakdown I had in February on the blog, i.e., my last post about being mortified when I said I had to stop writing on the Mildred because the fact that I hadn't finished Story #1 was too depressing for me to think about and have to admit to (both of) my blog readers, was a mirror of what was happening in my writing, i.e., I was paralyzing myself because I couldn't think of the ending. Maybe that description (of the writing) was not an apt mirror description of the blogging, but I lost my train of thought, because I left my computer to show Agnes something in this week's Time Out New York that is unrelated to any of this. This habit might be a tough one for me to break. (Yes, Agnes is here, and she is still NOT smoking. Her skin looks amazing! Hopefully, she will write again on the blog.)

Anyway, Bad Habit #3: overthinking what I write. Again, in both my blogging and in my writing, though I have an easier time with it when blogging, as evidenced above, when my last thought is not perfectly linked to my first thought. Or is it? I am not going back to read my blog post as I am posting in an effort to combat Bad Habit #3! In my writing, I am trying to write faster, let things come out more organically, unplanned, etc., etc. That's how writers can discover things and ideas and connections, or not. I learned that I can do this--write faster, I mean--when I was finishing Story #1 and wrote six pages (or maybe more) in one day.

Story #2 has begun. I have a dinner date with Our Dear Reader on April 16th and have said that it will be a celebration for me as I will have finished Story #2 on April 15th. I know you all doubt this--I am including you here, Agnes--but I am going to do it! Or I am going to try to do it, at least. Really I think I will finish it at the end of April.