"It's better than nothing."

There’s something I’ve been repeating to myself all week: “It’s better than nothing.” This comes as a result of way too many deadlines and not enough time to do any recreational writing.

In my forthcoming book, 365 Tips for Writers: Inspiration, Writing Prompts and Beat The Block Tips To Turbocharge Any Writer's Creativity (due out in December), I encourage readers to do some recreational writing as much as possible. As I say in the book: “Recreational writing gives the working writer an outlet for their creativity and it offers a break from writing the same thing every day.” It’s my chance to use creative liberty with my writing, to explore non-assignment ideas and to write stuff I don’t normally write. This allows my muse to keep going strong, to feel quite free to toss any story ideas or angles my way and to challenge my writing abilities with something different.

Unfortunately, I rarely got to do any of that this week. The only recreational writing I got to do were two chapters of my novel (and a novel is recreational writing unless a publisher has asked to see it). Almost all of the writing I’ve done this week has been for articles and my books (I’m working on three nonfiction titles and an E-Book). Any ideas I had for other writing were dutifully logged and set aside for later.

Still, another mantra I offer in my book is this: “Any writing is better than no writing.” And so, even as I could not do any recreational writing this week, I at least did SOME writing. And that’s more important. Each day of the week saw me writing SOMETHING: An essay for one nonfiction book, an article for a Web site, an article for a magazine, etc. It saw me doing some serious BIC each and every day.

So the week wasn’t all bad. I’ll get back to that novel, back to that script and back to that third collection of poems. I still managed to write every day this week. And that is, indeed, better than nothing.