Writers get admonished all the time about writing every day, like if they don’t do something, it’s a terrible sin.

But the reason for it is simple: It has to be done every day so the habit will stick.

If there’s no habit, it’s easy to drop off it when life gets in the way.

And then months, or even years pass.

And it is hard to do starting out. It can take years to build the habit.

When I worked with a cowriter, it took 2-3 years to write one book. We primarily wrote on the weekends, probably produced a thousand words, finished, then revised the book. We started submitting to an agent, and I told cowriter that we needed to learn how to write a book faster. If we got a contract, we were probably going to get a year deadline.

He poo-pooed it, saying everything was negotiable. I was horrified. I envisioned myself struggling at the last minute to produce a book while he didn’t participated. It hit me that writing wasn’t even on his priority list.

But it needed to be on mine. We parted company, and I tried to write every day.

It didn’t always happen, but I was able to do it most days of the week. Some days I didn’t produce much. Some days I produced a lot. And there were days where I just needed to do something else. It wasn’t perfect, which was okay.

At the end of February, I broke my foot. It was a clean break and didn’t need any surgery (yay!). It was my right foot, so I couldn’t drive. I did medical telework for 10 weeks.

My foot in the boot

I could not believe how tired I was! The first week it was all I could do to get through the day just for work. Writing? Not happening.

I finished work, and then I went to sleep for two hours (in hindsight, I should have done half-days for the first few weeks, but really, I’d never broken any bone before so I didn’t know what to expect).

But every day, I missed the habit of going to my computer and writing something. So when my foot came out of the boot for good, I allowed for about two weeks of being tired, and then I started writing again.