A Monkey Could Write a Book, Except...

I'll be back to book reviewing tomorrow - I'll actually be writing the rest of my reviews and hopefully set it up so they can post automatically over Christmas. But I've had a busy weekend and my laptop (which contains my super helpful master list) has been sitting blissfully unused today, so you get this rambling instead.

I've heard or read a few times that joke/saying that if a monkey sits down with a computer, eventually it'll hit the right combination of letters and spaces to write an entire book.

He's writing the Complete Works of Shakespeare, according to the Infinite Monkey Theorem.

I knew when I started writing that it wasn't going to be that easy.

(Actually, when I first decided "Hey, writing a book would be really cool!" I thought I would be writing masterpieces in a matter of months and become the next Christopher Paolini. So much for that idea.)

But anyway, by the time I finally started working on More Blessed, I had read enough author/aspiring author blogs that I had a pretty good idea of how difficult it is to get published. I've never had any false hopes about publishing this book, if and when it gets finished, and I wouldn't dream of querying until I had several more practice novels under my belt. The whole business aspect of writing, I have no illusions about.

The part that, strangely enough, I didn't consider being difficult was the actual sitting-down-and-writing-sixty-something-thousand-words part. I should have. In 7ish years of "writing," I managed to get a couple chapters written on a couple of ideas. Clearly, I have issues with focusing and motivating myself. I am proud of the 15,000 words I have written in the past few months, but I wish I was further along.

I seem to keep hitting all these blocks. Not writer's block, really, but a lack of interest in the current section. This is partially due to some issues in the beginning section, which I'm hoping to fix by adding in a character (which also makes some tweaking necessary, further distracting me from the part I'm not liking right now). The rest of it may be due to the fact that I have the middle chunk all plotted out. I've already visualized how it plays out so the actual putting scenes on paper seems so long and laborious. The end is still up for grabs, depending on how long the rest of the book is.

What I probably should do is force myself to make deadlines. As a recovering IB student and current college student, I have a love-hate relationship with procrastination. I hate doing it, but I love how quickly things get done at the last minute. I don't know exactly how I should go about doing this with book writing, but it seems to work well for other authors. I should probably set an end date, but even that would be too far away to be helpful. I have a feeling I'll be tying word count minimums to things like:

Going to see Sherlock Holmes. Multiple times.

For some reason I couldn't get these to not be blurry.

Finding a theater near me that's playing In the Land of Blood and Honey. And then seeing it several times.

I'm not even sure if it's being released in the indie theaters nearby.

Reading lots and lots of celebrity gossip. Especially about babies.

Especially when it concerns Angelina Jolie's babies.

What other bribes/motivations could I use?

More Blessed Word Count: whatever I said on the last post