Building Steam

I want very much for it all to happen at once.  I've never been happy with the slow building of progress, tending towards finding an aptitude early and then being discouraged that going beyond 'decent' at anything requires work. It's been a wall for me.  My brain is lazy, I've let it become so.  You can achieve a 'decent' amount by being just 'decent' at something. You can build whole careers by being 'decent'.

I don't want to just be 'decent' anymore.  I think it's a strategy that has worked as I've tried to figure out exactly what I want to do in life but it's taken me full circle.  Programming and Writing, two things I've done to some extent or another all my life. Each driven by stories.  The stories we tell the page, or the stories that Jira tells us to build in blocks of logic.

So here I am. I've mapped out a goal of being published within 5 years.  In my mind I don't mean self-published, though I imagine I'll have self-published in that timeframe as well.  I mean publisher backed, literary agent acquired published. Everything I'm reading and watching tells me it's a steep goal, but consistently the path is laid out in the same way. Write.

I feel a little silly.  It's true of everything, isn't it?  Want to become a better programmer?  Program.  Reader? Read.  Speaker? Give speeches.

So what I really need to practice, it seems, is the kind of steady perseverance that I've tended to avoid for many things and break through the wall of jumping to the next thing, and the next thing.  I did it for software development, and now that I have a steady job and a lifestyle around software development, I want to focus the other pieces of my time around becoming a better writer.

I've done a decent job over the last few weeks at showing up.  Slaying resistance.  I have a nominal level I want to write every day. 200 words.  On one hand I feel like I'm being too easy on myself, but I still have yet to have a streak longer than 10 days since I started.  There are a lot of reasons.  Sick, busy, stressed.  I don't want those reasons to be allowed to be excuses. I want to succeed.  Writing needs to become like oxygen again, as once it was when time was more available.  It must be treated as essential.

So I guess wish me luck.  I'll keep you all apprised.  Here's to my first X unpublished novels and my eventual published one to come sometime after.

Peace.

Shane