It’s only the 8th of January.  How’s your motivation level?  Still on track with those resolutions?

Here are few things to keep you inspired, one about starting and the other about finishing.

First is a piece on Go Into the Story based on an article in the Writers Almanac.  Isabel Allende starts a new novel every year on January 8th with an elaborate ritual:

Today, writer Isabel Allende is starting a new book, just as she has been doing every single January 8th for the past 29 years. On January 8, 1981, when Chilean-born Allende was living in Venezuela and working as a school administrator and freelance journalist, she got a phone call that her beloved grandfather, at 99 years old, was dying. She started writing him a letter, and that letter turned into her very first novel, The House of the Spirits. She said, “It was such a lucky book from the very beginning, that I kept that lucky date to start.”

Today is a sacred day for her, and she treats it in a ceremonial, ritualistic way. She gets up early this morning and goes alone to her office, where she lights candles “for the spirits and the muses.” She surrounds herself with fresh flowers and incense, and she meditates.

She sits down at the computer, turns it on, and begins to write. She says: “I try to write the first sentence in a state of trance, as if somebody else was writing it through me. That first sentence usually determines the whole book. It’s a door that opens into an unknown territory that I have to explore with my characters. And slowly as I write, the story seems to unfold itself, in spite of me.”

Go read the rest of Scott Myers’ piece.  But first watch this video of Seth Godin about avoiding self-sabotage and getting your project done and delivered.