I'm a Writer... So Why Aren't I Writing?

With the beginning of ROW80 Round 2 only a few days away, I thought I'd better get into gear and write my sign-in post :) Also, some of you following my Round 1 ROW80 rants may remember that I was working on a Multimedia Narrative assignment, in which I had to draw five characters for a fictional game of a recognisable genre. I've since finished the assignment, so here are my steampunk characters, in all their finished glory:

The other day I came to a sad realisation. I've been writing seriously for around ten years now (well, maybe seven; not sure if the garbage I wrote in high school counts as 'serious'), and yet I have never finished a story. Not even a first draft. Once this thought entered my head, I freaked out a bit, wondering if I was deluding myself by thinking I'd ever manage to become a published writer. Sure, I do a fair bit of writing in the holidays, but once I start back at uni, I tend to just give up and go, "Well, I have too much homework, I don't have time to write at the moment." But then I think about other writers pumping out a book or two each year, with a full time job and/or kids, and I think to myself, "If they can do it, why can't I?" I don't know what the writer's equivalent of a mid-life crisis is, but I think I just had it. Then I read this post from serial funny bastard, Chuck Wendig, paying close attention to the section on 'Cheating on Your Manuscript' (I know many of my friends will be nodding and smirking as they read this) and thought it could have been aimed at me specifically. I'm a story-whore. I can't help it. When it comes to novel ideas, I'm like that little kid running around the supermarket because she can't decide what lolly she wants, and then throwing a tantrum because she can't have all of them.

The first decent story I worked on was my high fantasy trilogy, Exile, which I wrote and workshopped throughout my years in the TAFE Writing and Editing course. About 25,000 words into that I lost momentum on the story - mainly because I really had no idea what happened next - and didn't write for almost a year. Then I had the idea for my dark fantasy novella, Dark and Silent Waters and, since Exile was still too intimidating to go back to, I more or less abandoned it, focussing instead on my novella. And now, though my main project is still DASW, I keep getting distracted by ideas for more stories. At this rate, I will never finish a book.

Something needs to change. If I want to be taken seriously as a writer, I have to make the time to write. And I have to learn to focus my creative energy on one damn project at a time. Which brings me to... ROW80 Round 2 Goals! *cue trumpet fanfare*

Since I'm working on my thesis as well as completing two other subjects, most of my time is going to be taken up by research, assignments and classes (as well as my part-time job). The most pressing of these are two things I have due Friday next week; my research proposal, and a survey questionnaire. However, I do want to add a small writing-only goal to my academic requirements, and that is to write between 100 and 500 words each day on my work in progress (DASW). This is a much smaller goal than anything I had in Round 1, but I think it's a lot more achievable in light of my workload. Ideally, I will get into the habit of doing this every day during ROW80 and therefore find it easier to continue once the challenge has ended.

I'll also only be doing one weekly ROW80 post, most likely on Wednesdays; writing two posts a week was a bit time consuming, and I can probably communicate my progress just as well with one post as with two.

To finish on a positive note after my emo writerly ramblings, here's an alien I drew during a Data and Networks lecture one day (in my defence, I was high on the sugar of pancakes with syrup, a hot chocolate and two cans of V):

And fear not, ROW80ers, Judgemental Dog will be at my side the whole way, nipping at the heels of all the writers out there to make them write faster :)