As instructed as part of Weronika’s Page-A-Day Challenge, I’m setting up one post to track my progress.

My “victim” for this challenge is an old manuscript I’m resurrecting. If you don’t already know, I’ve got three novels written.

My first, “After Happily Ever,” was finished back in the mid-1990s and is a retelling of Cinderella, but one which gives the stepmother and stepsisters a fair break and then goes on to tell what happens after the prince finds the girl. It was finished, it is finished, but I recently chopped 30,000 words out of it to make it better, stronger, faster, so … still finished, but much improved.

The second … well more about that in a moment.

The third is “After Titanic” which tells about a young woman who lost her husband on the Titanic on their way back from their honeymoon, and has brought back an orphan with her. He was handed to her as her lifeboat was lowered, and she felt obliged to look after him. Little does she know, though, that the child is enormously wealthy, which brings up all sorts of interesting problems for her as she tries to deal with her grief and restart her life in the midst of gossipy neighbors, a distraught mother-in-law, and nosy reporters poking around, looking for a good story. This one stood unfinished for years while I tried to figure out the legal ramifications of her trying to adopt a rich orphan, on her own, in 1912 when women still couldn’t even vote. But, as of a month or so ago, it is done now, too.

The thing is … my second novel got bumped to the wayside by the Titanic story, and so it has languished even longer, even though it’s about halfway done. 48,000 words, in fact, with a rough outline as to what has to happen in the second half. Not only that, it’s a sort-of sequel to the first book. Not a direct sequel, but one that follows the great-great-great-whatever granddaughter of the couple in my Cinderella story, here in modern day New York. (Or, kind of modern day New York. Judging by the dates I put on each chapter, I started writing this in 1997, and the occasional anachronism regarding cell phones or internet access is kind of amusing. But I’m digressing.)

The thing is, rereading what I’ve got, I’m still pretty intrigued by this story. I like Cynthia and John, the main characters, and I’m tickled by the side-story I squeezed in based on Sleeping Beauty. (Hey, don’t mock the fairy tales.They’re classics for a reason. The originals are far more fascinating than the Disney versions, too.)

So.

For this page-a-day challenge, I’m going to work on finishing this poor book, stuck in limbo for over a decade. I’m a pretty monogamous writer, in that I like to focus on one thing at a time, if I can, and it’s irked me for years that this incomplete novel has been sitting in my “works in progress” folder. For my own peace of mind, I need to at least get the first draft done.

The beginning: 179 pages, 48,358 words.

I’m not usually one to sign up for writing “challenges.” Externally imposed deadlines or goals always seem so … artificial.

But, then … Weronika Janczuk made an excellent point.

We discussed mind tricks for a little while, and the prime example included the “page-a-day” trick. Instead of giving yourself a word count goal or a time goal, all you owe yourself is to write a page a day. The trick here is that you don’t psyche yourself out. And, if the writing comes easily, you’ll end up writing twenty pages before you know it.
And what’s the worst case scenario? You spend one year writing a novel. Typical novels tend to be 350 double-spaced pages or fewer (12 point font, Times). I’ve blogged about the importance of patience, and here’s a way to do multiple things at once: Learn to be patient. Train your discipline. Write good pages. Think about structure and organization day in and day out.

She intrigued me.

Well, Weronika is an intriguing person to begin with, what with still being in high school (for a few more weeks) and having a finished novel. A good one, I hear. I wish I’d had her kind of drive when I was a teenager.

I’m getting off-track.

The POINT I’m endeavoring to make is that it doesn’t actually matter what kind of writing you do.

The POINT is to do it every day.

It’s not about the quantity. It’s not about large, staggering chunks of time in front of your computer screen.

It doesn’t have to be HARD.

But if you sit down every day and write a page, or a blog post, or an article, or whatever it is that you write, even 100 words a day is going to add up … especially when you let yourself relax into it and just let the words flow.

Because, every writer can tell you, the hardest part is SITTING DOWN AND STARTING.