Habit - Get Into It

(Tune in tomorrow for Ask Angela, a new Thursday feature. This week authors, Jessica James and Carol Gordon Ekster, get answers to their questions about book tours and ARCs. )

At the end of August I joined a listserv called blogbooktours. The aim of this group is to get people ready for virtual book tours. Their August challenge was for its members to post a blog a day for a month.

I'd gotten in on the tail end of this challenge, but I decided to make my own challenge. Beginning August 29, I started doing a blog each day here. It wasn't easy at first, and sometimes it still isn't, but I did get into the habit of daily blogging.

I went along pretty well, but then a distracting obstacle came along - vacation. Could I or did I want to continue blogging each day while on vacation? With many fun things to do and only a little over a week to do them, did I really want to spend time blogging? Even before I got to our summer cottage in Wisconsin, on Saturday I faced an over seven hour drive. Once at my destination, I also faced unpacking and organizing, which would take up time. Could I do my blog that day?

Fortunately, I remembered a feature on blogger where I could preschedule my posts. I didn't have a bunch of posts to schedule ahead of time, but I did manage to do an extra post the night before I left. I scheduled it to post the next day and it published as promised. The string of blogs was not broken.

I used the feature a few other times on vacation, but most of the time I fit my blogs in no matter what. Why? Because I got into the habit of doing so, even with other things to do, like shopping binges, a visit to a radio station, playing slots at the casino for hours, way too much eating of food, and a book signing at Book World in Eagle River, Wisconsin during Cranberry Fest.

Here's a photo from the signing.
If you start the right one, habit can be a good thing. Think of something you really want to do, but don't know if you can carry it through. It may be blogging. It may be getting a certain number of pages written on your manuscript each day. It may be submitting your manuscript to editors. You decide.

Once you start, pretty soon you'll get into the habit and it won't be so hard to do. Try it.