Behavioral Self-Management.

Read Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech. Please. It's pretty short, and one of the characters is named Margaret Cadaver.

Anyway, what this post is really about: School, for duh. In Psych we have an assignment to manage our behavior. (See post title.) We picked a behavior—say biting your fingernails or drinking water. (*Nudgenudge*, Snap.) For one week—last week—we observed how often we performed this behavior. Say we bit our fingernails 30 times a day or drank 0 glasses of water. Then we set goals for ourselves for the next three weeks: Get down to 20 bitings a day, or 1 glass of water a day for the first week, 10 bitings or 2 glasses the second week, 0 bitings or 3 glasses the third week. The point is gradually changing.

To do this, we also set daily and weekly rewards.

My behavior is writing, seeing as I don't seem to write at all. For one week I observed how much extracurricular prose I wrote, rounding it down to the nearest hundred. I wrote 0 all week. (Despairing emoticon.) So this week I'm just writing 500 words a day. If I get that before midnight, I can read facebook and other peoples' blogs. If I do it every day for a week, I can call someone. (Y'all might know how I like to talk on the phone sometimes.) Also—for every 1,500 mark I get in any particular story, I can read a chapter of Forest Born. And I don't mean I can write 1,500 in one story and 1,500 in another; I mean once I hit the 1,500 mark in a story, then 3,000 in that story or a different one, then 4,500—etc. (There are 30 chapters in Forest Born, so I'll write 45,000 words.) This ought to be incentive to stick with a story, right?

Right?*

Over the next two weeks I'll increase it to writing 1,000 and 1,500 words a day.

The thing is, I didn't get enough words on Thursday. I was going to call zAaron after this week because I haven't talked to him, but now I can't. I'm sorry.

*Why do I keep writing my paragraphs long-short-long-short? It's kind of funny. I've been doing it for a long time.

If I would complain about any part of my writer's block, it would be sprinting. In November 2008 while I was writing that novel, I could write 500 words in 10 minutes, no sweat. I'd do two 10-minute sprints and a 20-minute sprint and have 2,000 words for the day. It was kind of tiring, but I was still able to do it. And now I can't get 500 words in under 13 minutes, and it's like pulling teeth. It's been a year and a third. Please, when can I start writing again?