Life is Drudgery. We mundanes know this. Without the millions of dollars to buy the yacht and the mansion, it's just not exciting. It's the same thing day after day, month after month, year after year.
We are slaves, slaves to electronics, slaves to money, and especially; slaves to habits. We live in a world that shapes and forms our habits to its will. Get up in the morning, have a shower, eat, take the kids to school, go to work. Do your repetitive task hundreds of times a day, leave at your given time, pick up the kids, go home, eat, watch a little T.V., and finally, hit the sack. Repeat ad nauseam.
You get stuck in the loop—the one that drives you to drink, do drugs, gamble—or whatever it is that raises your adrenaline level or gives you the reward you need to feel good.
I've tried to cull my bad habits down. I smoke and drink coffee. (Caffeine and nicotine—they rhyme, so they must go together.) I don't really drink or indulge in the Electric Lettuce, can't really afford anything more expensive than that. I don't go cruising for chicks or even gamble. No, my reward is putting words on paper (or, these kind of words, electronical-like.)
At one time in my life, writing was so much a part of it that I had it completely ingrained into my daily schedule. I left work and wrote for two hours—that was MY time. Then, I went home and watched Star Bleck TNG while eating dinner. I got to the point that I automagically drove to the local coffee dive and just started doing my task. It was the highlight of my day. That was the time I got to be god. Creating, building, driving my characters onward toward their inevitable fate that I had planned. It was ten years in shaping and forming their lives, including their interactions and all over the course of over 1300 hand-written pages.
This is where the hard part starts. Firstly and foremost, the typing of my novel had to begin. Although I took typing in school, it was never one of my strong points. (It was one of those options I got stuck with.) I figure I can type about 19-25 words a minute if I am copying something—particularly if involves reading chicken-scratch writing, filled with edits and tiny bits of text written over top of the scratched out parts to tell my future self what I was thinking at the time.
Of course, the editing during the typing didn't help either. It slowed down the process greatly. While correcting pronouns and time-tense mistakes isn't too hard while you're typing along, having to stop, dig through the dictionary and/or the thesaurus creates a break in the stream of thought, while also destroying the tempo of the typing.
(And, yes, this was back in the time before the interweebs and all the glorious tools it provided, when that stupid little paperclip in Word was the best you had.)
Somewhere in the course of writing my second novel, I found myself getting lost in all of the characters that I created to interact with my stars, they had friends, and then, their friends had friends, and so on… About halfway through my second novel, I found myself having to go and create a paper database of sorts, so I could have a handy reference to who was travelling with who and who was doing what. It was a messy task.
Sometime in the middle of all this, I got married, Had kids and the whole life thing happened. Then, there was very little ME time. At some point I just put it all down, because it just became too overwhelming. However, as normal, life went on. I raised the kids, went to school, worked a regular job, moved our home several times, got divorced, became a single dad, went back to school... well, you get it, i'm sure...
Now, it's a new age. The kids are all grown, I have time again. I have taken up the torch of my heart again and began to write words in a digitized format. With any luck, they'll all form comprehensible sentences and weave the type of web around my readers' mind and interests that they used to. I've received some good feedback from others.
I guess I'll have to wait and see.
