Sprint or Marathon?

A fellow blogger and friend, Janet, posted today about her goal to spend 45 minutes every morning for the next 30 days writing before logging onto the internet. No email. No facebook. No nothing. Yikes! I can't imagine it. I am a serious email junkie. Not that I get much that isn't spam, but still. I love seeing the flashing envelope that tells me I have mail waiting for me. And don't even get me started on facebook! After I unfriended my parents, I actually started using it.

Yes I am aware of exactly how awful that sounds, but it's true. Mainly because the majority of what I post has to do with my writing and schoolwork. My writing they don't believe in because of what they saw happen with my cousin (whose name I'm not going to mention). Anyway, my cousin published her first book in 1995. It sold pretty well and was nominated for the Arthur C Clarke award. She knew she had many other stories inside her waiting to be told, so she quit her job and focused on writing full time. When her next book came out in 1996, it didn't do quite so well. Then her next book wasnt published until 1999. In the meanwhile, she was struggling, actually drowning, financially and couldn't find another job.

As my mother put it when I told her about my writing, "I don't want you to end up like [my cousin], 50 and nanny to someone else's brats because you thought the crap you came up with would actually sell."

Wonderfully supportive, wouldn't you say? After all, there is no chance I could possibly be realistic and know I'm not going to be raking it in like Rowling or Meyers. (Of course having been jobless and homeless, I also know how to survive on very little money, unlike the rest of my family.)

So while my parents were my facebook friends, I never felt like I could post a word about my writing. Now I feel free to do so.

And I have gotten way off topic :)

I freeze at the thought of sitting still for an entire 45 minutes and doing nothing but writing. I sit down at the computer and it's like one big (excuse the expression) brain fart. I couldn't even remember how to type my name. But short little writing spurts (especially if I am racing against someone else to see who accumulates the most words in a given time frame) work really well for me. I can type about 500-600 words in a 15 minute time period. It doesn't seem like a ton by itself, but multiply that by 4 separate 15 minute periods and suddenly I have 2000-2400 words. That's not a bad go for a day.

One of the reasons these short little writing spurts works so well for me is that the excuses are gone. Writing for an hour? My brain has a million and one excuses, I mean reasons why I can't sit for an entire hour - school, kids, job hunting, cleaning, food, etc. But 15 minutes? I can squeeze 15 minutes in anywhere. It's not long enough to interfere with everything else going on in life, yet the word count still grows steadily.

So that's my goal for the next 30 days - find at least 3 times a day where I can write for 15 minutes. That does not include school writing.

Are you a sprinter like me?

Or are you more a marathoner like Janet?

My original post today (until I read Janet's) was going to be a rant about the abysmal state of our school system and how they are ruining our children, but I will save that for a day when I have nothing writing-wise to post.