Got some good news from my editor the other day–she likes SOMEONE FOR SARAH. Hopefully that means only minor revisions. Now to try to recover my writing work ethic as I get into THE WEDDING TREE. These cold grey (”grey” really shows the mood better than “gray,” doesn’t it?) days really wreak havoc on it.  All I want to do is sleep and eat. But I slept last night, and lunch is done, so now it’s time to write.But I have no deadline right now, and it’s easy to fool myself and say there is no rush…

At these times I really need some tricks to get going. One is to light a scented candle on the printer–it’s a black cherry one currently. Another is to glance at my calendar. I’ve been using colored smiley faces on the days I write–at first I only had yellow, but now I have ones in various colors, and I’ve developed a whole symbolism system for the colors. A yellow smiley face equals an average writing day, orange a good one, pink a really good one, and red means  a red-hot writing day, when I’m really writing “in the flow” or writing fast because a deadline is looming. Green is for days when I’m doing something writing-related, like editing, going to a conference or writers’ meeting, doing some promotional activity. Green symbolizes to me that while I’m not actually composing new material, it’s definitely part of “growing my writing career.” Blue and purple faces–blue means I’m trying till I’m blue in the face, but there are too many interruptions to get much written, and purple means I tried but had to quit due to overwhelming interruptions. Fortunately there aren’t too many of those. I also write how many hours I wrote, or write my time in and time out, and make special mention of chapters or whole manuscript completion.

Glancing at that calendar really makes it impossible for this writer to fool herself about the number of days when there’s no smiley face at all–those days when I can’t write or I’m playing hooky from the keyboard. No faces=no writing, period. A calendar page full of smiley faces, especially yellow, orange, red and pink is my “time card” to prove I showed up to work. Maybe it’ll help if I ever get audited by the IRS for my home office deduction.

What tricks do you use? Let me know!

Blessings, Laurie