That’s basically what the name of this site means. Iqra=”read”, so “readwrites”. “Iqra” is my name so of course what I really mean is “I write”.

The funny thing is that I’m moving between reading and writing like a ping pong ball being bounced on a table between two players who definitely don’t want the ball to fall on their side. Writing a novel seems easy enough, just sit down and start writing until you stop. That is, unless you get sidetracked by, let’s say, a book on writing. Then you want to read a well written book, you know, just to see an example of good work. Of course, what actually happens is that you get discouraged by reading excellent writing. “I can never pull that off”, you say, tossing everything aside and opening the black hole of the Internet: Facebook.

Once you travel through the black hole and get thrown out on the other side, you realize that you have some non-novel writing to do. So you do it. After which you have no more energy to write, so you start watching a video instead.

The good thing is that nowadays I’m listening to the Leadership workshop by Nouman Ali Khan. It’s relevant. Come to think of it, everything is relevant. Like the author Bob Mayer says, living life gives you material for your novel. That means all procrastination is actually novel research work.

When push comes to shove, what I really need is to stop addressing the intangible “you” and talk about myself. While living life instead of actually writing and posting #amwriting tweets is all fine and dandy, that novel isn’t going to write itself. So why am I writing this blog post instead? I put this into the “exercising my writing muscles” category.

After I’ve exercised my writing muscles, read about writing, and listened about leadership, it’s time to…live life. Yup, actual novel writing time is not here yet. Hey, I do have 1800 words down (unedited), which I really should stop bragging about on the Women Writers, Women’s Books Facebook group, and not just because there are published authors there.

How about a goal to write at least 1000 words until next Friday’s blog post? Let’s see.