Once upon a time I had a love of something called Write or Die to put the prod in my productivity. It had a setting called kamakaze (I have never been able to spell that) that would delete your text word by word after a short grace period if you weren't writing and it was great at keeping you writing. There was also this one that wasn't greatly effective on me because it was someone playing a violin (actually, no, it sounded bigger than a violin) but it was out of tune and they were scratching the hell out of it and it was just a whole pile of uncomfortable. The problem with that one for me was that it felt like nails down a chalkboard feels like to most people. I know it's not physically possible to experience pain within your brain because there are no pain receptors up there, but it felt like it was causing physical pain up there and the creative process would jam to a grinding halt until way after the sound stopped, but to stop the sound, you had to write, so most of the time I just bashed at the keys for something unintelligible, highlighted it when the thing stopped and started typing over it. This is one of those moments where the means friends you had back in the two thousands would give you a thumbs up and say cool story, bro, but in the nineties, I probably used it as a wrong use of the phrase and what?
Basically, Charlie, why the flip are you telling this story? If you have followed me through anything NaNoWriMo related before, you'll know I'm not a planner. I don't do planning much, if at all. I scribbled down a list of blogs I could think about writing this month and it was maybe nine things, but I've used about two of them because I've just picked up things as I've gone along. That's what I'm doing tonight. I spent too long in the bath washing my mane of hair (that is quite short these days, for me anyway, so I could probably dry it to look like a ginger lion's mane) and reading VOX, which was what I was originally going to write about tonight and time ran away with me and I was thinking, argh, crap, I need to write my four hundred and forty-four words before midnight and have time to post a blog and I have a to-do list as long as my arm of things I haven't even started doing yet and I REALLY WANT TO SLEEP!
But like I did the year I started writing Fairies, actually, the month I was writing Fairies, I thought just write about writing. Just write about something you know and something you love and the rest will come. Inspiration for Fairies took three days to arrive. The proper inspiration for the sequel took nearly ten years; thankfully this blog came along a lot quicker.
If this teaches you nothing else, let it teach you to get up, get out whatever you write with and just make a start. Write about the landscape outside of your window, write about the people on the plane up in the sky above you, or write about what the fairies at the end of the garden are up to. You can't edit what's not on the page, so just jump the first hurdle first.
Charlieswrite
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