A Good Monday

It was a good Monday, which will hopefully set the tone for the rest of the week. It seems like I've had a hard time getting through weeks with my focus intact, but I don't remember the last time Monday left me in such a good mood.

After posting the blog yesterday, I opened up a blank Word doc, typed "Chapter One" centered at the top of the page, skipped two lines, and thought for a little while about how to begin. It took me about twenty minutes to compose a first paragraph that I was comfortable with, and then I started picking up steam. An hour and fifteen minutes later, babe had to tap me on the shoulder multiple times to let me know breakfast was on the table and getting cold. By the time I got up from the writing desk, she had already eaten and my breakfast, two eggs over easy on toasted sandwich thins with avocado spread, was indeed cold. But I was feeling warm and cozy.

At that point, I'd written 744 words and, unlike most days when I'm kind of glad the writing is done for the day, I finished breakfast and went back to the writing computer for another half hour. In the end, 1055 words and the first scene of chapter one are done. Huzzah!

The rest of the day was as expected. Work was slow, unfortunately, so the day dragged and money was a little on the low side, but I have the whole week to make up the difference. I started listening to "Dune," by Frank Herbert, on audiobook and got through the first chapter. I'm enjoying it, and looking forward to continuing today. I switched over to music because slow days and audiobooks combine to make me sleepy in the car, which makes the day drag even worse. Music, and later in the day, sports radio, keep me alert and serve as good background for thinking about stuff.

Stuff, in this case, was my critical voice starting to gnaw away at me about the quality of the morning writing. I started to worry that what I'd written wasn't a good beginning, remembering all the writing advice about how the first pages are crucial, how you have to hook your reader early and keep hooking them on every page. It's good advice. 

Look, I'm new to this. I've written before, but I've never completed a novel. I've never sold a piece of my work for publication, and other than friends and associates commenting on my work, I've never gotten much feedback. 

I've had a few teachers who slapped me with the talent word, which is probably at least partly responsible for me never giving up this dream all these years. I was eight years old the first time a teacher, Mrs. Carter, told me I was a good writer and I should keep at it, so it's been about 40 years of me writing on and off and keeping this dream alive. Encourage your students, teachers! No one in my family growing up ever encouraged me to be a writer. I think both my parents actively discouraged the idea. 

Those teachers, particularly my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Carter, an English professor at Mercy College whose name I don't remember, English professor and poet Michael Broek from Brookdale Community College, and writer an creative writing professor Jeff Ford, have all reassured me and encouraged me at various points in my life that, no, I was not wasting my time and, yes, there's something there. There's a point to all this. I believe professor Broek said, "You see things differently," and called one of my poems for class, "one of the best poems he'd read in the last ten years." Jeff Ford was both more oblique and more direct. "Yeah, you can write. You just need to sit down and do the work to get better."

Professor Ford's words are the truth. All the talent in the world is useless if you don't use it, and talent doesn't make you good at something. Practice does.

So, the point of all this tangential thinking, is that it's okay if I feel like my first scene in the first chapter of the first novel I'm going to actually finish needs work. It probably does. But it's all practice, and writing the best I can right now is the only way I'm going to eventually be able to write as well as I want to write.

There, now that we've taken my critical voice and reminded it of its place, I need to wrap up this ramble of a blog and get to writing. I don't wake up at 4:30 every day because the coffee tastes better then.

Last thoughts about yesterday. After work, I came home, ate dinner while talking to the babe, and then immersed myself in my favorite hobby, Strat-O-Matic Baseball. It's a game I may have mentioned before (maybe not) where you play out baseball games with cards and dice. The cars represent historic MLB players, like Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, and even contemporary players like Mike Trout. I'm currently playing out a league with eight great teams from 1905-1921. If you want to know more, check them out at www.strat-o-matic.com, They have games for all four major American sports. (Hockey, not NASCAR!)

The point is, doing that to end my day gave me something to focus my time on, instead of just tuning out and falling asleep watching television or going braindead on social media. I went to bed happy as a result. I think it's important to spend a little of that focus energy on a hobby you care about each day, even if it's only a half hour before bed. It renews your energy and gives you a little bit of balance.

I still read for a half hour in bed before I turned out the light. Can't neglect that. I'm actually approaching my 2020 Goodreads Reading Challenge goal of 52 books read this year. I think there are seven weeks in the year, and I have nine to go. I'm halfway through Scalzi's "The Human Division," and I just started "Dune" on audiobook, so that's two. I think I will make it!

Man, this went on too long. Sorry.

See you tomorrow.