Today the only task was to make a schedule for when you are going to write. The advice of the book is that you get up an hour earlier and pack in the writing there. This isn’t really going to work for me. I mean, yes, I could get up an hour earlier, but I’m not going to write first thing in the morning. That isn’t when I write. I need to exercise, drink water, take my meds, eat breakfast and do my planner before anything else. If I just jumped into writing first thing I would just stare at the screen for an hour.
There isn’t really a guideline in the book of how much time I should be at the writing every day. Before this week, in my daily task list, I had “Writing (15 minutes)” and it was pretty far down on the list, so if I changed it to 30 and moved it up that would be 30 minutes more than I was doing last week, but less than I could do.
Last time I attempted the Writer’s Boot Camp day 3 was as far as I got. I filled out the little time chart and said I was going to write 4 hours a day! I didn’t. That was too much of a commitment when just trying to get into the habit. In my opinion, it is better to have small manageable goals that you can actually reach than to have lofty ones that you strive for but can seldom hit.
I feel my last attempt at this was a good example, I was in the middle of a deep depression when I stated this before in late January, early February. My husband had just left me for another woman about 6 weeks earlier. I was angry, hurt, confused, my self-worth was at its lowest point in my adult life. I hated myself, I had been engaging in exercise bulimia, actually bulimia and cutting around that time. The only reason I was able to do the three days I did was that I was on a beach camping trip with my friend Issa, who loves me no matter what, which made me feel a little less like a big pile of trash for a few days. 
Once the trip was over I didn’t write, I went back to tequila, exercising about 3 hours a day and hating myself.
A few weeks later I had stopped the cutting, stopped the drinking and was trying to eat a healthy diet. I was feeling a little better emotionally and starting to look for a job, but still, the only non-cat related joy in my life was running and that got taken away from me due to some shitty broken sidewalk. But that is a different blog post.
Anyway, the point is the goal I set was unreachable for the person I was in February 2017. I already felt like the biggest failure in the world, so why bother trying to write 4 hours a day? Writing 3 hours would have been failing as much as writing nothing. So I went with nothing.
I figured why do anything if you know you are going to fail? Hey, that’s sort of a segway to the YouTube channel I just started working on. I’ve never made a YouTube channel before. I always wanted to, but I couldn’t think of a good single specific thing that would get me those “1000 true fans” you need. Fuck, I can’t get 50 true fans for my writing, so I have decided to do a YouTube channel about something not very specific, but that I am passionate about. The working title is “How to be a failure at everything you try”, roll with it, it’s more uplifting than it sounds.
Ok, back to my daily writing time goal.
I am committing to writing 30 minutes every day, for the next 27 days no matter what. If I have to sit here I write “banana” over and over for 30 minutes I will. I’m also committing to writing longer than 30 minutes if I am in the grove, the words are flowing and I don’t have anything else super important that I must to right that second.
Yeah, 30 minutes is less time than it takes to write these blog posts, so maybe I will spend the next 27 days in the masturbatory practice of writing about writing, but yo, at least it’s writing. 
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