Tuesday, June 15, 2004
Wish I Could Be More Like Karen By Night
Sometimes 2000 words rears up and bites you in the ass. When I left work on Friday, I planned to spend a significant part of the weekend finishing the fantasy story Ed had critiqued and starting something new. Best laid plans, blahblahblah.
Saturday started with coffee and Car Talk, and darned if the second caller - Simon from Roanoke, VA - wasn't a friend from high school. Sometimes his absence among my circle of friends and acquaintances these days is more palpable than others, and these last several weeks have been one of those times. And there Simon is on my radio, talking to Click and Clack about how his car goes click-click-click whenever he turns to the left. His solution is to adjust the routes he travels so that he doesn't make left turns, which gets a good laugh from the guys and is just so reminiscent of the friend I remember.
It took a while before I sat down to write - like, around 10PM on Sunday. When I started doing housecleaning chores Saturday afternoon, I knew I was in full-blown procrastination mode. I hate housework. If I'm doing housework, then I'm avoiding doing something else. And I wasn't just dusting and vacuuming, either; I was sorting through stuff, re-organizing stuff, and basically making a bigger mess (to the eye of a Martha Stewart type unaccustomed to the cleaning and organizational skills of a pack rat, at least) of the apartment than it had been when I started out. So this was heavy-duty procrastination. Sunday was more of the same until I left for the D&D game (in which we finally trounced the lich and his vampiric minions, were rewarded with a keep with a healing pool and caverns of demons below it [I'd call that a double-edged reward], lots of gps, and a few spell scrolls - and XP to level up). Home after the game, I finally sat down to work on the story, deciding around midnight that it would just have to go unfinished and I'd have to renege on the deal with Ed since I didn't really have anything new to give him.
Then Monday turned into a r-e-a-l-l-y s-l-o-w d-a-y. So most of the day I worked on that story, so by ten to 5, it had doubled in size and reached a more finished point where I felt like I could toss it to Ed and not be wasting his time or mine. And I basically felt this odd sort of envigorated-yet-sapped kind of energy. Still went to play darts later.
Saturday started with coffee and Car Talk, and darned if the second caller - Simon from Roanoke, VA - wasn't a friend from high school. Sometimes his absence among my circle of friends and acquaintances these days is more palpable than others, and these last several weeks have been one of those times. And there Simon is on my radio, talking to Click and Clack about how his car goes click-click-click whenever he turns to the left. His solution is to adjust the routes he travels so that he doesn't make left turns, which gets a good laugh from the guys and is just so reminiscent of the friend I remember.
It took a while before I sat down to write - like, around 10PM on Sunday. When I started doing housecleaning chores Saturday afternoon, I knew I was in full-blown procrastination mode. I hate housework. If I'm doing housework, then I'm avoiding doing something else. And I wasn't just dusting and vacuuming, either; I was sorting through stuff, re-organizing stuff, and basically making a bigger mess (to the eye of a Martha Stewart type unaccustomed to the cleaning and organizational skills of a pack rat, at least) of the apartment than it had been when I started out. So this was heavy-duty procrastination. Sunday was more of the same until I left for the D&D game (in which we finally trounced the lich and his vampiric minions, were rewarded with a keep with a healing pool and caverns of demons below it [I'd call that a double-edged reward], lots of gps, and a few spell scrolls - and XP to level up). Home after the game, I finally sat down to work on the story, deciding around midnight that it would just have to go unfinished and I'd have to renege on the deal with Ed since I didn't really have anything new to give him.
Then Monday turned into a r-e-a-l-l-y s-l-o-w d-a-y. So most of the day I worked on that story, so by ten to 5, it had doubled in size and reached a more finished point where I felt like I could toss it to Ed and not be wasting his time or mine. And I basically felt this odd sort of envigorated-yet-sapped kind of energy. Still went to play darts later.
