On Thanksgiving I sat down, after the craziness of the day had passed, and took advantage of a quiet moment to write our family’s holiday card – you know, the letter that will be tucked in with the cute little card of the kids doing fun stuff over the course of 2012 and mailed off to family and friends as a well-intentioned but woefully inadequate way of keeping in touch? I’m sure you’re familiar with the genre.
Anyways, I’ve only ever written one of these before, and I will admit to having had a few glasses of wine, so when I went back yesterday to read it over, I was actually amazed to find that I pretty much hit it out of the park on my first try.
I’ve often said that writing is like exercising. You have to do it all the time if you want to have any endurance or skill. And even though I’m not necessarily writing fiction all day every day, I am thinking critically about written content a lot of the time, so that when I do sit down to work on the novel, the words actually come out like I want them to. As a matter of fact, not to brag or anything, but I’m in the best writing shape of my life.
It’s a fact I’m most happy about at 5 am when I sit down to work on the fiction. It’s not historically my best time of day, but I’ve trained myself well enough that once I’m sitting in front of the laptop, the story just flows.
I wish I could say the same about my physical fitness. The Tough Mudder is only two months away and I have completely fallen off the training bandwagon. Ug. There just isn’t enough time in the day. The more I write, the less I run.
So at least when I fall flat on my face in the mud and can’t get across the monkey bars, I can console myself that my novel is coming along nicely.
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