Saying no to everyday distractions has never been much of a problem for me.
Noise, nonsense, people wanting your time for things that don’t matter — that part is easy. By trade I’ve always been a troubleshooter. Something breaks, you figure out why, you fix it, and you move on. Most goals work the same way. Make a plan, follow the steps, don’t overthink it, and eventually the job gets done.
External interference I can handle.
Internal interference is where things start getting interesting.
Right now I’m working on the first draft of a novel. The idea started about a year ago on Memoirs of Madness, and once I got rolling the pages came faster than I expected. I’m sitting at fifty-four thousand words out of an eighty-thousand word goal. At this pace I should have the first draft done by the beginning of the third quarter, assuming I don’t lose my mind before then.
On paper, everything looks fine.
Inside my head, it sounds like a different meeting entirely.
There’s a voice in there that keeps asking what the hell I think I’m doing.
Tells me I’m only good enough to write short pieces.
Reminds me — very helpfully — of all the other novels I started over the years that are now sitting on hard drives like unfinished home improvement projects nobody wants to talk about.
The problem isn’t ideas.
It’s confidence.
Or more accurately, the lack of it at exactly the wrong time.
The strange thing is, I probably write better now than I did years ago. At least I think I do. Hard to say. Self-evaluation has never been my strong suit. I can fix a machine without questioning my life choices, but put a blank page in front of me and suddenly I’m negotiating with ghosts.
I’m pretty sure they make pills for that. No idea if my insurance covers it.
When my wife was alive, I didn’t second-guess things this much. I’d write something, hand it to her, and wait. She’d read a few lines, get this look on her face like she wasn’t sure whether to laugh or schedule me an appointment with somebody. Then she’d shake her head and tell me there was something wrong with me.
That’s how I knew I was on the right track.
If she liked something too much, I’d delete the whole thing and start over. Couldn’t trust it otherwise. If it didn’t make her look at me sideways, it probably wasn’t worth keeping.
I don’t get that look anymore.
So these days saying no to distractions is easy.
Saying no to doubt is the part I’m still working on.
Because if I let that voice run the show, this novel will end up in the same place as the others — sitting on a hard drive somewhere, taking up space, right next to all the projects I was absolutely sure I was going to finish.
And I’ve got enough of those already.
I don’t need another one.
Memoirs of Madness 