No More Excuses by Linda S. Glaz

Okay, Thanksgiving feasts are over. Christmas gift exchanges all done. 2013 come and gone and 2014 in full swing.

Now, with the Super Bowl finished again for another year, the last of the big distractions, what is your excuse? What is keeping you from finishing that novel?

Every year, friends have thousands of excuses why they aren’t sitting at the keyboard banging on the keys, writing the story that’s been whirling in their brains for years, and for years, there have been more creative excuses than the year before.

What happens to someone who wants to write?

Do you have a story waiting to be told? Why are you only talking about it?

Yes, it takes courage to put yourself out there, to spend every spare minute of your life imagining a place, people, circumstances, and making them come alive. But to the victor go the spoils. If you aren’t successful in completing your novel, you will never know the wonder of victory. I have a favorite quote I’d like to share as I feel it is as much for a writer as it was for the warrior:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”  

--Terry Roosevelt

So what are you waiting for? You have the story in you just itching to get out…

Oh, wait! I forgot. It’s almost Valentine’s Day.

 No time for writing.