Something has been gnawing at me. One of those things that are obvious, but you just can’t sort it out, or verbalize it exactly? I mean, I’ve been writing, but it just seems like it’s such a… hobby.

I sit here. Words end up on pages. Pages accumulate. I’m just not feeling the fire or passion of it all. I think it is that I have been putting writing on the albeit short to-do list for the day, and when it’s done, so am I.

Writing? Check.

Gym? Check.

Cool, what do I want to do with my day now that I did my required things?

And, honestly, that’s not the point of this.

One of the things that made writing successful in Thailand was the whole point of being cut off and isolated. The advertisements weren’t in English. When you saw a random television, they weren’t speaking English. The locals didn’t speak at the level where you’d have extended random conversations. The tourists were cordial, but we all did our own things, only occasionally joining one another for dinner or somesuch.

Writing was passionate and fun, and I would be writing quickly with a smile on my face, as some new audacious element came to me and was being recorded.

So, things obviously need to change around here. I don’t think I can force the passion, but I think that comes with a mindset that has more commitment. The book largely needs to become obsessive. Distractions should happen, but they should not be appearing with the regularity they have been. The intake of (downloaded) TV shows, movies, and everything else needs to grind down.

Only reading and writing need to occur every day. Everything else is superfluous.

While I’m not writing this book on deadline, in some way I am now. At some point, I will run out of money, unemployment will run out, and I will need to re-enter the workforce, or find some other kind of work. Basically, this is the most amazing window of time I will ever have to write this book, so it needs to be treated as the precious commodity it is.

Looking back on my recent schedule, I think I could have written longer every day. I think at another point during the day, I could have edited what I had written to give myself a better launching pad for the following day. Play time needs to end. I want to be writing to exhaustion, giving in because I’m so tired and I can’t keep my eyes open any longer. That’s a bit much, but on the sliding scale of how much more I can be doing, it is a healthier goal than what I am doing now.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 5th, 2005 at 12:19 am and is filed under diary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.