Fun?

Doing your work isn’t always fun. In fact, it’s usually not fun.

But that’s not quite right either. While I’m doing it, it’s fun. Getting to that point—pulling out the laptop, opening the file, reading through what I’ve written so far, typing the first few words—that’s not fun.

But, when you turn pro, you realize this. You accept that it’s not fun. You do it anyway. You realize that the not-fun setting up is just a prelude to a lot of fun.

And, if you keep on pushing through that not-fun, you eventually look back and realize that you have a lot of work done. Like today: I’m over seven thousand words into the rough draft of Giant Armors, which amazes me even as I type this. That’s about a quarter of the entire novel; maybe more, depending on how the rest of it goes.

Tonight, I’m cleaning up a last few grammatical stains and blemishes, then submitting the first chapter to my writing group. Hooray! I have actual, real content to show to other people.

And that’s fun.

I’ll also note I’ve re-arranged this journal layout yet again. Now that the VR story‘s done, I don’t really need the center column, so I removed it and put the rest of the stuff that was there over in the left-hand side of the page. I’m still not completely satisfied with this layout, but then I’ve never been completely satisfied with my journal’s layout. Ah well; I can always do a bit more tweaking.