One Day at a Time My daughter’s facing writer’s block. She’s halfway through her first major work-in-progress and she’s losing motivation. It’s that sagging middle, as my crit partners say. She knows where she needs to go withher story, but the work to get there seems overwhelming. When you’re 8-years-old, playing outside is much more compelling than writing the rest of your masterpiece and mailing it to Reading Rainbow for their annual contest. I understand exactly how she feels. When I hit those tough spots, almost anything can call me away from my WIP. Dirty bathroom, unloading the dishwasher, walking the dog – all are more interesting than tackling how to get my hero to stop ignoring my heroine or to get that pesky secondary character out of the limelight he or she keeps stealing. When I decided to start taking writing seriously, I made a commitment to myself – I would finish a full-length novel. Up to that point, I’d had a series of great ideas that didn’t get beyond the first chapter many times and never got beyond the third chapter. This time, I wasn’t concerned about quality with the manuscript or how long it took. I just wanted to complete a first draft. The hardest part was the middle, so I set a schedule. I’d write a little every day, at the same time every day, no matter what happened. I didn’t give myself a quota for the number of words, although I had goals. All I wanted was to keep going. I finally finished that first draft. It took a long time, but it was worth it. I grew in confidence because I’d proved I could do it. While my first novel is yet unpublished, currently sitting on an editor’s desk instead, my romantic time travel, The Vicar’s Vixen, is being released this month. I did it all one day at a time. Cliché but true. If you want to write, the only way to do it is to write. If you’re having trouble, set a schedule and commit. Stay with it. As for my daughter, we came up with a solution to her writer’s block. She committed to writing two sentences every day. Breaking it down in manageable chunks made it much less daunting and, with only 100 to 350 words to write, she’s almost there. During college and the first years of her working life, Kristin started several stories which she never completed.  After stints in corporate America and higher education, she left paying work to care for her young children.  One year later, she took up writing again, this time with a commitment to finish what she’d started. It took three years, between diaper changes, mega-loads of laundry, and lots of negotiations with her children, but she finished her first full-length novel and has been writing ever since.Her writing focuses on time travel and historicals, particularly in the Regency period, but she’s currently working on a contemporary. Which she has promised to finish.