Things I Do, and Things I Want to Do

If you look on this blog so far you can kind of see a pattern in terms of things I do and things I want to do.

The things I do every day or think about every day are:
- my job
- my dog
- my weight loss (though I don't think about this one too much as walking every day and eating three meals a day are automatic for me now)
- my reading (finished both books I started a week ago: I read one on my Kindle at work and one at home in paperback before I go to bed at night)

The things I want to do are:
- Write every day (and more than just this blog)
- Go back to school and get my degree

The 'write every day' bit is not to get paralyzed by the fact that I'm having trouble focusing on writing itself. This blog is going okay for me right now because I have a limited space and can confine myself to one page at a time. My writing projects on the other hand are more than one page and for some bonkers reason that's pinching me in the throat and pulling me back from doing any work on them.

So what do I do about that?

Move the 'write every day' into the 'Things I Do list and out of the 'Things I Want to Do' list.

The things I do:
- my job
- my dog
- my weight loss (though I don't think about this one too much as walking every day and eating three meals a day are automatic for me now)
- my reading (finished both books I started a week ago: I read one on my Kindle at work and one at home in paperback before I go to bed at night)
- Write every day.

There. I did it. Now, what to do write every day? It seems like I every time I set up a plan or a schedule it goes to hell in a basket as soon as the pencil led settles on the paper (I write mostly with mechanical pencils because pens always run out of ink for me). It seems that I can come up with ideas just fine- it's just fleshing them out that's the problem.

How did I do it before then? I actually had a spreadsheet I used to track what project I was working on and the daily word count. For me it was like seeing that I was making progress on a project and seeing what days were good for me in terms of word count kept me working, like a schedule or progress chart. It also showed me what goals were realistic for me. So add that to the To Do List for today: set up writing spreadsheet.

Finally, I think another thing that's hindered me with the writing is that the ideas I come up with are what I'm calling 'books'. My first thought when I think of writing a book is 50,000+ words. Trust me, that's a lot of words. But I know I know I don't have to use that as my word count every single time. These new ideas are probably better in a shorter format though if they hit the 50k mark that's fine, too.