Here's the book you should read: The Power of Less.

One of the book's ideas that I most need to practice--and it's not even close to being a new idea, I just really need to practice it--is living in the now. I really need to practice this when it comes to writing (of which I've already done a thousand words this morning, thank you very much). I'm really bad at being present when I write. Here are some examples.

Being in the past: "Wow. How cool are you, trying to write a novel at age 28. Maybe if you'd actually had the guts to start practicing when you realized you wanted to do this at age 12 you'd have a chance, but you're were a spineless jelly and now look at you. Look at all the time you've wasted. Dork."

Being in the future. "Wow. Look at you cooking right along. If you keep this pace up, in fifteen years you'll be able to have written and had rejected seven novels. Won't that be cool? And people will still be asking you when you're going to try to write a novel, and you'll secretly get to know that you've tried and failed seven times. How fun will that be? Dork."

You see how this goes. Even if I'm not thinking horribly disparaging thoughts about how utterly lame it is to try to be a novelist, I'm thinking other wretched things.

"I'm so glad that I'm revising this scene, and not the scene I have to revise tomorrow. Tomorrow's scene sucks and is completely out of character for my character so I basically get to delete severa hours' work and start from scratch. Tomorrow's going to be the writing session from hell."

Way to be positive, huh?

I've decided that the reason I like gardening and baking and scrapbooking is because I find all of those things pleasant but not glorious. And since I'm not particularly experienced with any of them, just being good enough makes me happy. But with writing I'm acutely aware of how horribly deficient my words are, how desperately far from the mark I fall with every morpheme. It's agonizing. You think I'm hard on other people's writing . . . man. You should see what I think of my own.

Also, gardening, baking and scrapbooking all produce actual resuts with relatively little risk or effort. Writing is like trying to bluff my mother-in-law out of a full pot when all I have is a pair of twos. (And just so you know, my MIL calls everything, whether she has anything in her hand or not.)

I think this 5 am blogging session just got derailed.

Yawning, so tired, must go edit papers.

Loveth,

Heidi