This morning I woke up early to take a crack at the book. It was somewhere around 5 AM, and after I wrote down what had come to me, I hit up Twitter to see who else was up and posting. The Dalai Lama (@DalaiLama) had this to say:

(For those who don’t do graphical interfaces, he tweeted “You need self-confidence and determination: feeling depressed and losing hope will never really help to correct any situation.”)

This guy is like a Tibetan fortune cookie, slapping me upside the head. I don’t regularly see his tweets in my Twitter stream, perhaps due to time zone differences, but this one was a perfect shakabuku. Lately, I’ve been swamped with “real” work (i.e. the stuff that pays my bills), which has been causing Naked Montreal to fall by the wayside. It’s been getting me down, and I started to feel depressed about it, like I would never get around to finishing this book. But it’s true: feeling depressed and losing hope don’t help. You’ve just got to get up early in the morning, give your cat some quick snuggles, and then get to work.

So here I am, working on my novel. And you know what? 5 AM never felt so good.