La Tragedia Andante

Have you ever choked on something? Or maybe been underwater for too long a had to propel yourself to the surface at full speed if you ever wanted to breathe again? If you have, then you know how I've come to feel. If you haven't, consider yourself very lucky.

The irony here is that I'm drowning in a drought. A drought of words, ideas, accomplishments, etc. I have simply forgotten how to write. The fact that I don't have much time for it doesn't help, and the remedy is actually pretty simple when you think about it: all I have to do is make more time.

Ok, good. So let's put that into practice, shall we? Let's say it's Saturday. I wake up nice and late, say around nine, and eat breakfast and be lazy until ten. And then it's time for showers and homework, which takes absolutely HOURS if you're in APUSH like me. And on certain blessed days, I go do service hours. By the time I'm done with that and home, it's almost one and the homework will still not let me rest. I feel tired and stressed, so I read. On it goes, leaving me with almost no breaks worth writing anything in. There's time enough to read a quick chapter, but start an actual story? Please. On weekdays it's just as bad,with a good three hours worth of homework that I can only start after I get home from track practice around six. There's just no time during the day.

Key phrase here: during the day. The natural day, which usually starts at 6:30 exactly on weekdays and whenever I feel like it on weekends. And this leads me to the solution, the way I will write something every day and climb out of this arid well once and for all. It's so simple that I'm surprised I haven't thought of this before-- I'm just going to wake up earlier.

You may not think this is a major revelation, but to be, it's like giving the day 25 hours instead of 24. If I wake up at 5 a.m., I get an entire hour and a half of time previously occupied by sleep. by going to bed a little earlier, I lose almost nothing and gain peace of mind. I really can't get over how easy this seems!

So that's the plan. Wake up early and write something. I've heard on more than one occasion that it takes 10,000 (yes, ten thousand) hours of doing something before you get good at it. I'm not sure how many hours I've logged of real, serious writing that's gone through edits and made me feel good, but I'm going to start right now. I'm going to keep a journal with me and log every minuted I spend doing thought-out writing (this doesn't count as anything but a warm up because of that) and every idea that I come up with. At this point, no thought can be discredited as a bad idea. I'm sure that if everything happens for a reason, so does every thought.

And you, yes you, can keep me accountable. On any given day you can ask me if I've written anything lately, and the answer will always be a yes, accompanied by the writing itself. No excuses or complaints. I'll figure out how to make this work-- I swear on the great Shakespeare Bible.