All right. I'm back on my feet again.

Sorry for the gap in last week's blog entries. Wednesday night I started feeling not so hot and by Thursday morning, I was definitely down for the count (of two work days at least). Today is the first day I've felt semi-human--I was actually able to breathe out of both sides of my nose this morning for a brief and wonderous period of about fifteen minutes. I have a sinus infection, which should be getting better any year now, I hope.

Which brings me to my blog entry for the day. I thought about writing of all the disgusting and yet miraculous things the human body can do to heal itself (I still have no sense of taste, which is probably good because all the sinus stuff has been making me feel sick to my stomach--easiest diet I've ever heard of), but I figured that would probably be really too much information and more than a little off-topic. So I'll save "Ode to Mucus" for another day : ) And instead I'll talk about probably the most important thing you can do to be a good writer.

And that is...are you ready? Sit your butt in the chair everyday and write something on your current project. It doesn't matter if it's ten pages or ten sentences, but you have to keep moving or else you lose your momentum. Plus, it's amazing how quickly those little stints of two pages (or whatever your daily goal) add up. And if you don't do it everyday, sometimes you lose the freshness of whatever you're writing. You feel more removed, like you're the reader instead of the writer.

But, you say, wouldn't a little perspective be a good thing occasionally? To allow you to view your work as it truly is? The answer, NO! At least not until the end. For a couple reasons, one, you're still in the writing stage, so you don't want to go in there tinkering around as you may end up eliminating something you need later. And two, because you will begin to doubt yourself, it is a disease inherent in all writers, I believe. Probably all artists.

If you like what you have, inevitably, you will feel as you begin to write again that the new stuff on the page isn't as good as the previous stuff. Or, worse, you'll hate everything you have done and that'll destroy any desire to move forward.

In either case, you have to keep going. Writing without editing. Because the truth is, in the end, when the book is finished, you'll have the whole picture. And you'll be able to better see which parts fit and which don't. And the sections, characters and chapters that go into each of those categories (fit and don't fit) might be very different by the end of the book than they were in the middle.

Plus, at the end of the book, you won't be able to tell which pages were written on the good writing days and the bad writing days. Everyone has some of both. And to paraphrase Stephen King in On Writing (which is an excellent book that I recommend for all writers, regardless of genre): You won't be able to tell the good days from the ones where you feel like all you're managing to do is shovel sh*t from a sitting position. (Boy, I know that feeling--he describes it perfectly...another reason to read his book instead of my paraphrasing him).

Which leads me back to my main point. Write everyday. Set a goal. I think page or word limits work best in the beginning. I try for at least two pages every day before I go to work. Sometimes, I get there, sometimes I don't. Sometimes I get even more than two : ) Those are the really good days! I don't let myself feel bad about my progress unless I don't write anything at all. Which brings me back to the whole illness thing. Tomorrow, I have to begin writing again after three days away from it. The actual anticipation is usually worse than doing it. But it's so much easier to stay in the flow than it is to try to jump back in. But I'll do it, even though it will feel difficult. Because that's what writers do. They sit in their chairs everyday and put some words down, good, bad or undecided, on a page or a screen. And in the end, they've got something. A short story, a novel, a screen play. And then they can decide how to fix it, if it needs fixing it all.

Thought for the day: If you only write one page a day, in a year, you'll have novel-length manuscript. (Or, a whole bunch of short stories!) So, it's not about writing a book, it's about those one or two pages a day.

Okay, that's about enough of the pep talk (which was as much for me as for anyone else who's reading!)

Talk to you tomorrow (provided the mucus-slinging sinus monsters allow me to be up and moving around a second day in a row!) Sorry about all the mentions of the "m" word -- I think it's just a fun one to say, as disgusting as it is!