Welcome to August’s Merry Go Round Blog Tour.  Are you motivated?  I can’t hear yooouuu. For the record, I HATED that when I was a member of the military.  I attended Academic Instructor School at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas in the fall of 1983.  The Academic Instructor School was co-located with the Air Force Recruiting School.  Future recruiters had begin each class session shouting “Boy, are we enthusiastic!” (and they had to sound like they meant it, too).  I felt for them.  I was non-volled to instructor duty — I was eternally grateful I wasn’t “hand-picked” for recruiter duty.  That was when I learned “Special Duty” was another word for “jobs we can’t get enough people to do.”  How have I managed to get this far off the topic of staying motivated?  Or is it a digression?

I spent nearly half my military career as an instructor.  It wasn’t that bad, but I didn’t really volunteer for any of those assignments.  The Air Force chose me for them.  One could say they provided my motivation, but writers have to provide their own motivation.  Waiting around for someone else to tell you to writer is going to result in a lot of waiting, because, unless you already have a loyal, enthusiastic readership, nobody cares if you write or not.  In fact, most of us could make a case that it doesn’t really matter.  There are already millions of books that have been published, and more are being published every single day — some by traditional publishing houses, some by independent publishers, some by publishers an author pays to put their book into print, and, more recently, authors are taking matters into their own hands and publishing their own work.  No.  There’s no shortage of books on the market, so an aspiring author could very easily back away from the keyboard or the pen(cil) and perform other duties.  Many do.  I’ve sometimes been tempted to do just that.

So, how do I stay motivated?  Honestly, sometimes I don’t.  But I’m not quite ready to completely throw in the towel on this endeavor.  There was a time when I could string words together pretty well.  There have been several times when I was able to do so.  I firmly believe I can learn to do so on a more consistent basis, and that’s why I haven’t moved on to other endeavors and excluded this one.

The simplest motivation is a refusal to quit.  Sometimes external things will keep you motivated long enough to not quit — maybe it’s a little contest, or a challenge, or an encouraging word from someone who matters to you, or even from someone you don’t know.  It’s hard to know where a spark will come from that helps someone keep moving toward a goal.  Sometimes, even a discouraging word will spark motivation to prove someone wrong.  Sometimes the answer is “all of the above” and at others, it’s “none of the above.”

What motivates you to keep working toward achieving a dream?