Headed into Labor Day weekend, and I don't have a whole heck of a lot
to say.

Other than that I finished a story today. I'm starting to understand the
real reason that Dean Wesley Smith focuses on the butt in chair part of the
process.

As a writer, I'm going to spend a basic number of hours on a story. How many
depends on my process, where I am so far as learning to do it, the length
of the story, what have you.

But there's going to be a number of hours involved, one way or another. Just
the law of getting the words down on paper.

If you're putting your butt in chair hours in every day, whether at the point
where I'm only consistently at an hour or all the way up to some of the pulp
writers that managed eight full hours a day five days a week, you're putting
your focus in.

I got a story done this week that I was expecting to take a full five days.
Part of the reason it got done was I'm busy extending myself, working in more
time every day.

But the other part of it was that I realized, glimpsed the edges of some of
the things Dean says, about just recognizing what the story needs to be.

I can't do that if I'm not putting in the time every day. It's easy to say
to myself, 'hey, think about putting this in tomorrow, or focus on that'.

Easy to say, hard to actually accomplish. It's a lot easier to accomplish it
when you're sitting there, knowing you're going to be there as long as it takes
to get through each line that's going to come.

It builds, brick by brick. The confidence to know that I can do some things now
that I wouldn't have been able to do, just a few months ago.

Let's see what kind of stories I can tell now. What kind of stories are
waiting to be told, now.