Just Do It: Generating Enthusiasm.

Hober Mallow.

We all have good days and bad days.

As a writer, we might want to figure out how to generate a little enthusiasm from time to time.

It’s been a long winter, after all, and we just want to get out there and see a little sunshine.

Maybe things haven’t been going our way.

I just wrote about a thousand words on something that looks like a parody novella or novelette. A kooky spy thriller. The work itself makes me laugh—that’s a good thing, right?

This morning I noted that I had sold a couple of books on Sony. The other day I sold a copy of Time Storm on Amazon. I saw my account go up a few bucks.

Story A, is up to 9,200 words. Another story, Story B, also on the desktop, is at about 6,000. I published an excerpt from ‘Heaven Is Too Far Away’ this morning and I blog on weekends anyway. There are more readers on a weekend. I get more clicks.

I just ordered a proof of my new pen-name’s first full-length thriller. My proof copy of ‘Selected Poems’ is all set to go. All I have to do, (when I get a minute) is to complete the transaction. Am I enthusiastic or am I simply going about my duties in a normal fashion? At some point I make it all look just a little too easy…

There are days when I wake up and don’t have a hell of a lot of enthusiasm. It’s only 1,000 words written so far today. But that adds up to 365,000 words a year—and now we’re starting to look like something. But only if we can do that every day—good days and bad days.

It’s all about allocation. If I blog twice a week, averaging 500 words per post, then that takes 52,000 words right off the top of my yearly total. It leaves enough words for three novels. Or two novels and a bunch of short stories. The key thing is to keep pecking away at them.

It takes time, production time, from other things to be on Facebook. Yeah, but it is nice to have a few friends as well, and writers can get a little isolated if they aren’t careful.

So this is why it’s good to be able to generate some kind of enthusiasm in ourselves, and why we might sort of want to portion that out in a manner that doesn’t dilute or dissipate everything all in one go.

My new pen-name hit the 2,000 follower limit on Twitter, and so I have a little time off from doing that whole ‘click-click-click’ thing. It’s necessary, and doable, but not the sort of thing that generates enthusiasm. I merely endure it.

But I will say this. Any true adventure involves risk, suffering and sacrifice, and the rewards are sometimes intangible.

You know what I hate doing? Formatting on Blogger, a six or seven thousand word story, that ultimately gets thirty page hits in the first day. Yet I do it anyway—I just had to suffer through it.

If I wanted that story published, and no one else was going to do it for me, then I really had no choice, did I?

I wouldn’t call that enthusiasm. For me it’s more of a Just Do It sort of thing.

All of the stories I wrote recently are submitted. There’s nothing to do there but wait. I have plenty of material in folders to keep the blog going for quite some time, even if I didn’t write anything new for a month or two anyway.

I must have had enthusiasm, at least once or twice along the way. All that material had to come from somewhere.

Here are most of my titles, available on iTunes. ‘The Handbag’s Tale’ is free and that’s Epub format.

You know I wrote this in the afternoon, left it in draft and posted it during Prime Time, don't you?

That's a free blogging tip for you. Here is a previous post on Time Management.