Feeding my spirit

I have had three different Palm Pilot PDA's over the course of years, and my experience with them has been that they die after about two years of use. I rely heavily on my PDA and I take it with me practically everywhere I go. I use it to keep my schedule and my contact list at my fingertips, and I use it to jot down ideas that I come up with while they're still fresh in my mind.

My previous PDA was a Palm TX. Recently I have noticed that its battery won't hold a charge any more. I would plug it in overnight so it would charge and the next day I would turn it on and it would tell me that the battery level was still low. So I have been without a functioning PDA for some three to four weeks - not good!

Last week I bought a "new" old Palm through craigslist. It's a Palm m515 - a step up from the first unit that I had. It's functional, and it was cheap compared to the cost of today's smart phones.

While I was in the process of syncing it for the first time, I came across some notes and scenes that I had written for Mission: Dawn. I looked over some of them and found that I still liked what I had written.

So I've become all fired up about writing my books again. I started Mission: Dawn four years ago and to date I've got three partially written chapters. I started That Warrior Spirit and to date I've got three completed chapters in first draft form.

Writing a book has been a life-long ambition for me. It goes back to my first visit to the public library when I came away from seeing all those books on display and said, "Wow! When I grow up I'm going to write a book!" (See The Written Word ). Well, maybe I'm not done growing up yet - but why let that stop me!

I sometimes find it hard to justify taking the time to work on one of my books when I have a business to run. For me, writing a book (or more) is something that falls into the quadrant of Important But Not Urgent. I have no deadline pressing me to write. However, by not working on it I'm starting to feel like I'm starving my spirit. Having two incomplete books on my list has become one of my tolerances, and I'm starting to feel like it's sapping my energy.

So here is what I am going to do about it. I'm making it one of my SMART goals. Between now and end of September, I'm putting in two writing sessions a week into my schedule, each session up to two hours, and I'll be using those sessions to advance my progress on both books.