Procrastination, procrastination
Is makin’ me late
Is keepin’ ’em waitin’
(with apologies to Carly Simon)
I write part-time. I thought I’d be writing full time by now, but somehow when you spend 20+ years being an entrepreneur, when you start to walk away from your business it follows you — and mine walks faster than I can! Even though I’m not actively networking or marketing anymore, the work keeps showing up. Between new clients and projects, and ongoing maintenance clients, and presentations on WordPress to my local RWA chapter, my work-workload is bigger than I had anticipated.
We’ve also got a house for sale, a vacation property, and have run into weird stuff going on over there (including potential purchasers who tried to pull off a scam with an HVAC company by vandalizing a furnace and then giving us a quote to replace it for four times the correct cost! Legal action might be more trouble than it’s worth, unfortunately; I’d just like the opportunity to smack someone. Even metaphorically.). Combine that with ageing parents at a distance, and the normal age-related health issues that creep up and bite you when you least expect them to, and you’ve got a recipe for a higher-than-I-like personal stress level.
So my writing has suffered. Actually, it’s pretty much stalled at the moment. It’s all that stuff, I tell you! It’s not that I’ve hit the point in this story where things start heating up between the main characters and I haven’t a clue how to write that, or simply a sagging middle causing a dip in the plot road I can’t see out of yet.
Nope, it’s work. And stress. And work stress. And laundry, and dinner, and is that a text from one of our sons? And…
I’m procrastinating. I have two scenes that need major edits (ok, rewrites) based on review feedback from my writing coach before I can move on, because since I’m mostly a pantzer I need to write THIS scene before I can move on to THAT scene otherwise I don’t know what happened before so I don’t know what happens next. And then I sort of know what my next two scenes are, in very (very) general terms, but how they play out will depend a lot on the heat level on the two rewrites.
Stuck, again, said Eeyore. Yup, that’s me. Somehow my Writing switch has gotten toggled from Now to Later.
Well. Looks like it’ll be a writing weekend, then. After I get the laundry swapped over. And the presentation finished.
What do you do, when life gets in the way and the writing suffers as a result? Do you have any stock tricks for flipping that switch back to Now?
(And this post is really funny, in hindsight, when I read my own previous post — see below. Such is life. Guess I need to clear my mental pipes again!)