What is this, Day 6? Writing is still going well and I am keeping up. I finished Chapter 5 yesterday/today and today wrote the first page or so of Chapter 6. Chapter 6 goes back to the other character's side of the story, which is good because I need more time to think about how I want Hinako's story to progress. It's nice to finally be making progress, even if the quality is not so great.

Thursday at dinner a girl from my program asked me how my writing was going. I told her how I had not written anything for well over a month and then recently started writing an hour a day. She said, "Oh, that's good, to take a break and then start writing again when you're inspired." Maybe it's okay to take a break sometimes, but I think a one month break is just awful and lazy. There's nothing good about it. And I didn't start writing again because I was inspired. Inspiration happens in the early stages as a story idea is still fresh with endless possibilities. At this point, maybe a fourth of the way through the story, it's all about discipline. Forcing yourself to write and slugging through it no matter how you feel that day. There's no inspiration, except that which you create if you desperately need to delude yourself into believing that there is inspiration. Inspiration, if there is such a thing, only comes when you stick your butt in the chair, open up that story file, and start typing out the shaky ideas that you don't think will work but type anyway because you've got nothing else. That is my kind of inspiration.