While nail polish shopping yesterday, I stopped to try on jeans and see if I could squeeze my ass into the next size down from what I've been wearing. And I could! And they looked good on me, even!

*wiggles shrunken ass*

Ahem. So. An anonymouse in one of my comments threads (and I use the term "thread" generously here) asked how I manage to sit down and write every day, being as I have ADD. I thought I'd post the answer here in case anybody else cares to know. And the answer is two-fold.

1) Not to sound too trite or Nike-sponsored, but I just do it. And no, it's not as easy as it sounds. It's probably easier for me, for now, because one of the advantages to not having found a job yet is that I don't really have much else to do, or at least nothing that can't fall behind writing on my list of priorities. So I have the luxury of being able to pick a time of day at which I'm the most able to focus and schedule my writing then. Right now this happens to be the first few hours of my day, starting as soon as I wake up, before too much else has a chance to distract me. But the point is that I make writing a daily priority and don't let it get pushed to the wayside by everything else I've got going on. I dont' write all day, mind, or at least not usually. I have a daily goal of 1,000 words, and (when I'm in the groove) spend as much time as it takes to reach that goal. Sometimes it takes an entire eight-hour work day. Sometimes it takes an hour. Sometimes I get hyperfocused and lose all track of time and my word count and whether I need to eat or pee and write an entire chapter or short story in one sitting. But usually it's about a thousand words, and it falls somewhere between two and three hours (the first of which is usually spent reading over what I wrote the previous day and then staring at nothing and trying to will the characters to speak to me). If I take enough short breaks and don't let people or pets distract me, I can stay focused for that long without too much effort. Also, once I get started with the actual writing part, it's usually pretty easy for me to leave it for a while and then come back to it, say, after lunch, or having to stop to break up a (literal) cat fight.

2) To be honest, I don't write every day. For one thing I usually have to take at least one day a week off, usually on the weekend, in order to get all the crap done that I've been putting off all week for the sake of writing, and also just so I can have a chance to relax and have some fun. And after I take a day off, it usually takes at least two or three days to get back into a solid groove. But the rest of the week, I sit down every day, either at my computer or in my "quiet place" with pen and paper, or, if the house is too distracting, I go to a coffee shop or someplace that's conducive to getting myself into work mode (I can't begin to explain why sometimes it's easier for me to focus in a coffee house full of noisy strangers than in a quiet room all by myself). Do I always produce anything when I sit down? Uh, that'd be a no. Generally, the first day after my day off, I sit there the entire time with my head in my hands, or staring at a wall or out the window at nothing in particular, just trying to access the story in my head. Usually, not much gets written on these days, if at all. The second day is a little more iffy--sometimes I wake up inspired and ready to go and the words flow like milk and honey, and sometimes I have to spend half my time trying to dig back down to the story and I only write about half my daily quota, if that much. But usually by the third day I'm back in the groove and everything flows pretty smoothly. And on the smooth-flowing days I usually write enough to make up for the shortage of the previous days.

The point is that I at least make an attempt almost every day. And whether on any given day I only write a word or a paragraph or a page or a whole chapter, as long as I keep at it, pretty soon it all starts to add up to something substantial that I can feel good about. I'm not sure who said it first--probably Stephen King--but if you only write one page a day, as long as you do it every day, at the end of a year you'll have a pretty decent-sized novel to show for it. And one page really isn't very much.