Time not wasted! I swear!

I was about to write that I've done no writing today, and that the last two hours have been wasted on reading posts at Absolute Write, a website I discovered when I first started writing what I like to call "My First Crappy Novel" - this has morphed into two working titles: "People Having Lives" (which in my tired state wrote Lifes the other day - eye roll!) and "Deer in the Headlights."

At any rate, these last two hours haven't really been a waste of time. Aside from getting a laugh from a post by somone who has self-published books that are riddled with typos and grammar problems, then accusing people of being jealous, I've gotten some really good information - I think half the trouble with me is wanting to know how other writers do it - thank god for forums and blogs! It is probably because I want to assure myself that I am doing at least as good as or better than the others out there. And today, I'm mostly silently commiserating with myself and others who can't read a word of their writing and not think "This is shit." - it seems to be a commonplace thing, so I won't worry about it unless I rewrite the thing twenty times and five years from now it still sucks. Lots of people don't sell their first novel anyway, right? Right. Why am I so concerned about 'reading' it? Aren't I supposed to be writing it? LOL.

Every five minutes I say to myself, I need to get writing! I did manage to turn off the TV twenty minutes ago, which didn't really help because I usually ignore it anyway...it did motivate me to write, I guess, just not on the novel....

Just got a knock on my door - a sheriff looking for someone named Roberta...weird! and a little scarey...

I'm sure that I'll spend ten or twenty minutes editing this post, then maybe I'll finally get around to writing. I have the opposite problem of many writers, and I know I would be whipped if any of them were physically near me - I have too much time to write. And I still put it off. Bad me!! Unfortunately, making myself feel guilty about not writing never helps much. But my little black book (where I put my word count for the day and the time window that I was writing in) and reading all those posts will - reading *something*, almost always *anything* (except maybe directions for hooking up a CD Rom) will inspire me to write - actually, anytime I see something written badly, I'm inspired to write. Even if my stuff is crap, it's gotta be better than someone else's. Oddly enough, rereading that last sentence, I'm not a competitive person. I guess I just like to feel superior. ;)

Of course I'll be posting later with a word count for today...I won't let myself let this day leave without putting something down to call progress.

All in all, it's really not that difficult, just writing. That's all it is. Just moving the fingers and making words. It's making it good that's the hard part - and I can do that in the second draft. I'm much too critical of myself to even know if anything I'm writing right now is good.