Drive

It's been a long time since I've written a post like this, and I was rather hoping that I wouldn't have to. I was doing really good recently on writing, and I was closing the gap between fiction and real talk posts being where I wanted them to be, getting a lot of fiction written. But I've really been running out of drive to write recently, and I hate that, because I have a friend who is constantly trying to inspire me, and I've made a lot of promises to people about continuing to write, and I love writing. But I've just not even been wanting to recently.

There are some things that have been happening in my life the last couple of months that I could easily blame the lack of drive on. To say that they don't have any impact on it would be blatantly lying. But I don't want to lay the blame entirely on those things, because there are other things in other aspects of my life that I have been able to keep pushing myself on and making progress in. So if I can push myself on losing weight, and eating food I'm not particularly fond of and completely depriving myself of the unhealthy food that used to be a staple of my diet and gave me comfort, why can't I keep writing?

And you'd think some of the accomplishments I have made recently would help me push forward. I just recently crossed the threshold of six hundred blog posts, and I have surely not missed a single day of writing in well over a year. At this point, it is possible I am even getting close to having done so for a year and a half. Many of those have not been as good as I want them to be, and lately I've found that I don't concern myself as much as I used to with whether or not my posts hit the five hundred word goal that I once set for them. It's not that I'm not trying to get that anymore, or that I think I know when I have hit that without having to check. It's just that I would rather feel that what I am trying to write is done, rather then that they are at a specified word count.

Realistically, that's probably a better way of thinking about my writing. It gives me a little more freedom, and makes me feel less constrained by numbers. That means that if I fall short by fifty words or something, I don't feel like I have to add an extraneous paragraph just to hit my goal, which in the past I have, and has made me feel like I'm adding something that I don't want to actually add. Not that I think my writing before that is perfect in any sense of the word. But there is a reason that in editing you typically do a lot more cutting than adding.