Write every day

Earlier this week I made a challenge that I would write two chapters of my book every day or I would pay $10 to my friend Lucas.

Today is the third day.

What’s made this easier is that I’ve already written a mostly-complete chapter outline so I can just pick a topic and write about it.

However, now that I’m on day three, I’ve already used up the topics that were easiest to write and now I’m writing the ones I had been avoiding the whole time.

It’s 4:42am and I just finished the second chapter of the day. It took me roughly two hours.

My hands hurt and my back is sore, but it’s done!

The best part is I hadn’t written a chapter in at least a month up until the past two weeks, and in the past week I’ve written more than half the book.

Inevitable motivation. Create the circumstances for yourself so that the consequences of failing are worse than succeeding.

For me, all it takes is putting some money on the line.

At 10am, the alarm went off. Although I lay in bed for the next hour drifting in and out of sleep, I did manage to write THREE CHAPTERS in that time!

Tomorrow I will be doing BJJ, but if I have time I’d like to write one more chapter.

Once again, I have escaped having to pay Jeff and Travis my money :)

Now it’s time to go to work!

What I’ve found is that it’s not very effective to write after a long day at work.

My most flowing and creative moments are after a long night of socializing and gaming women (the content relates directly to the book which is about dating and social skills).

So after work is out of the question. It just isn’t effective. After work is a time for left-brained things (like I did tonight: dividing the interviews I did last week into segments)

What I’m thinking is that I will just have to get up earlier on days that I work. Normally I wake up at 11am or 12am on work days without any problems, but this coming Monday (my next shift after tomorrow) I’m resolving right now to wake up at 10am and try to write before I go to work.

I’d make it a challenge, but that wouldn’t complete this goal… So I’m just going to declare it.

If I don’t wake up on Monday at 10am and write sometime before 3pm, I have to pay Jeff and Travis $5 each.

I’m still trying to track down when my most creative moments are, my best times for writing.

So far I’ve found these times.

1. After long talks about life with good friends.
2. After reading a great book.
3. After waking up and doing my morning routine

The morning routine is a bit of a challenge to integrate since by the time it’s over, I’m usually out the door and on my way to work.

I’m going to try calling a friend up then writing something on my next day off.

For now, writing here on 43things is giving me an outlet.

I’m writing every day, but I can’t really mark this as done.

Why? The writing I’m doing now is very casual, stream of consciousness style, which is great for getting me warmed-up and keeping my proverbial axe sharp, but it’s not book writing.

When I write an article, I know it’s only a page or two, so it gets done no problem.

When I write a chapters, all the consideration of how it will fit into “the big picture”, how it will need to be edited, etc. gets me bummed out and I quit before I get too far.

My friend gave me a few pages of notes on writing an ebook, so I’m going to take a look at that then hit the drawing board again.

Been doing great on this.

Dragon Naturally Speaking (a speech-to-text application) makes it easier for me because typing slows me down and hurts my hands making “writing” a painful experience.