Eye of the Writer

  Never mind that my vision is utterly crappy (without my glasses, at least). What I'm trying to say is that up until recently, even though I want to get published very badly, I wasn't working at the speed that I needed to be to get something done and published before Dad made me get a job. I was writing a lot, yeah, but I was writing one paragraph a day in thirty different stories instead of thirty paragraphs in one story that I would try to send off. Things just weren't getting done at the pace that they needed to be getting done for me to actually, you know, do something. And it doesn't help that I'm just a slow writer, besides. I mean, I can know exactly what I want to say and have ten scenes planned and playing out in my mind but I can't get through 'em all because I write so dang slow. 
  What I needed was something to speed me up--something that wasn't illegal and, you know, potentially fatal (I bet Charlie Sheen could write a million books a day with all that extra speed  he has lying around). Just some motivation, I guess you could say, something besides my dad telling me that maybe his grandchildren could read my first published book to his gravestone or threatening to make me work at CVS or something like that. 
  And then, last Saturday, at the beginning of my three-day weekend, I got my swift kick in the pants. 
  Dad had seen this two-hour Rocky retrospective on the Biography channel a few weeks ago and I was checking the guide and it turned out it was on again, and I remembered Dad saying that he thought my brother would like it, so I told him and we recorded it. To shorten this a bit, we watched it Saturday night, and I discovered that Sylvester Stallone wrote the first draft of Rocky in an eighty-page notebook in three and a half days. Eighty pages in three and a half days. I couldn't write eighty pages in three and a half weeks.
  Consider pants officially kicked. 
  While the whole three-and-a-half day thing is a feat I will never be able to do by hand, at least (the only way I would be able to do that and count it as "amazing," because I could go a mile a minute on the computer any day and that's not that amazing), I have managed to focus a bit more than I normally would have, banging out seven pages four days in one story. 
  Yes, I think I've got my focus now.