First thing tomorrow...

About once a week I think "I should really get started on my book...first thing tomorrow". I have a lot of these right before I fall asleep ideas. Some others that I am sure other people share are "As of tomorrow, I am not eating any food" or "Starting tomorrow I will go back to the gym" and "Starting tomorrow I am going to convince my parole officer that I deserve to join the McDonald's management program".

The problem about most of these late-night ambitions is that tomorrow happens, and you prefer to have the day you had yesterday than starting doing something new that will suck. Even if it is good for you, your family, your country or humanity, sometimes being indulgent is just more fun.

Starting a book for example, would not be hard for me to do. I basically don't do anything all day. I would have to set up a new Word document, format it and give a title separator like "Chapter One". You don't even have to give the book a title yet. If I did just that, I would have officially started the book I want to write. That 5 minutes of setting up the document formatting would be enough for me to not do anything on the book for a full year because at that point I would have already started it. I just can't bring myself to do it.

The real reason I don't write a book, is that I am lazy. Here are my concerns:
-Do I need to map out the plot of the book.
-Do I need to spend time creating a personality for each main character and develop it?
-Do I need to do any research into the time period of the story? Probably, right?
-How much time is that going to take before I actually start writing?
-Is anyone committed enough to read multiple drafts of my book? (That's an easy answer, I don't think my mom would even do that.)

At this moment, listing the 5 concerns I have is definitely the most progress I have made on my book.

To answer your question, no, my book wouldn't be about me. It wouldn't even be loosely based on my life. Let's be honest, I may have a few good stories here and there but I probably wouldn't want to read about them and I lived them first-hand. The book of my stories would read much like the book "I hope they serve beer in hell". (Terrible book).

At one point I was convinced I was going to write a book about one crazy weekend I had in Florence when I was studying abroad. I think I actually did write a chapter or two of that book on a private Live Journal account. The book was going to be called "48 hours i basta". The problem with this idea was the great stories starting from that weekend continued and I had to change the name to "72 hours i basta" then "one week i basta" and so on. It lost its appeal.

The book I want to write about would be a narrative of love and two people's drive to stay together in the face of political and social adversity. I know this sounds like a common story, however I imagine it much more romantic then "The Notebook". The real tragedy is that I will never write it. Instead I will post blogs about fart jokes and all the unacceptable things I encounter on a daily basis. These things keep me distracted and that is was keeps me writing to all 5 of you.

It would be so much easier and more graatifying to live in someone else's body and feel the joy of things like when that person finishes and sells their first novel, goes to the gym, or even has a really satisfying poop.