I’d like to say I have these great writing organizational skills, and every day I wake up, grab my cup of coffee and sit down at my neatly cleaned desk to pound out the pages, completely uninterrupted.
Ha! It never works that way. The phone rings, I have to deal with emails, to-do lists, promotional tasks, things that pop up that have to be dealt with immediately, and sometimes those kinds of things can take up the entire day.
So how do I manage to write for multiple publishers, have nonstop deadlines and put out multiple books a year?
I hate to steal from Nike here, but I just do it. I know what needs to be done, when it needs to be done, and I manage to get it done. Why? Because I want this.
This is the life I dreamed of. This is the career I always wanted. Now that I have it, I bust my butt to make sure I make my deadlines, I not only write my books, I promote the hell out of them. I place ads, I have bookmarks made for almost every book and then I send them out to booksellers. I run contests and giveaways to promote my work. I devote about 70 hours a week to my job. Ask Biker Dude. He’ll tell you how much time I spend on my work.
So if you want this, you have to work at it. And if that means 6 pages a day, 1500 words a day for 70 days to get a book done, then it’s worth it. It’s not that much. Write a paragraph here and there throughout your day. Fit it in where you can. Sometimes I’ll do a page here, a page there, other times I’ll pound out anywhere from 2 pages to an entire chapter in one sitting. It all depends on what else is going on, how many interruptions I have, and what kind of day I’m having. But if I set a goal, you can bet I’m going to achieve it.
I’ve set a goal to get this book done. I’m going to get it done. I love a challenge. It gets my blood fired up, and knowing other people are out there doing the same thing really spurs me on to write.
Don’t come up with all the reasons you can’t do it. Come up with just one reason you can. Don’t you really want this bad? I do. I always have.
So write. And don’t compare your progress to mine, or to anyone else’s. If you don’t do 6 pages a day, don’t worry. Maybe tomorrow you’ll do 10. Maybe you won’t. But if you make progress on your book each and every day, isn’t that what counts?
:cheer: