Persistence

What’s the saying? Fall down 12 times, get up 13. Sometimes it feels more like fall down 30, get up 31.

I’m thinking of this because I found one of my old calendars that I used to log when I got writing done. It looks like back in 1999, I wrote every day for a couple months, and then there’s six weeks of X’s on the days. I think that means I lost the thread of daily writing. And then it’s blank. That looks like I got discouraged and stopped logging my failures. But I know that wasn’t the end of it.

A few months later, an irregular pattern of notes about what I wrote that day start up. So if you’re struggling to get writing done, remember it’s always going to be a struggle. You might even quit for a while. But you won’t succeed unless you keep trying.

As for my current struggle, yesterday’s sentence turned into:

The dome warped their view of the platform hovering like a teatray in the orangey-pink sky, if you’re used to teatrays with retro-rockets and nano-cables dangling from the the middle down to the softlanding module on the red sand.

That came after another after midnight of scrounging another couple hundred words out of my brain.

The sentence I’m going to finish today is:

Supposedly there was a real sound, a faint report barely audible through the thin Martian air and the dulling effect of the dome, but nothing compared to…

I know what the next few words might be, but I’m not sure how long this sentence might keep going. I wonder if tonight I’ll start writing before midnight.