Captain Procrastination

Oh my god, have I dropped the writ­ing ball?

March started off with a run (I had a rare day to myself), and since then I haven’t man­aged to sit down for more than an hour and cre­ate a damn thing. For the most part, I’ve just felt meh, but aside from this I’ve also just been run­ning around — mostly fart­ing about with things that could have waited — and watch­ing TV shows that really, don’t need to be watched. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not wan­der­ing off into ‘real­ity TV-ville’, I just got bogged down watch­ing a series of things, and this last time I blame Sons of Anar­chy. I felt it needed fin­ish­ing so I could put it down and move back in front of my com­puter. I did man­age to get May 5 fin­ished, and I could say I was tak­ing a lit­tle break, but to be hon­est that would be bull­shit - go figure.

Any­way, the rea­sons I haven’t writ­ten are bor­ing, not to men­tion repet­i­tive. I tried to get a few beta read­ers to peruse And The Stars Ran Red, but to be hon­est nobody seemed to take an inter­est. This is fine, I’m unsure of the final prod­uct myself and I’ve READ it, I can’t blame oth­ers for not want­ing to commit.

I think it dawned on me these last cou­ple of weeks that I’m com­pletely los­ing my con­vic­tion for writ­ing, and I’ve just about lost any trust in my own abil­i­ties — prob­a­bly the rea­son I’m cre­at­ing dis­trac­tions for myself. I have no faith in my writ­ing any­more, and appar­ently that’s over­whelm­ing my want to actu­ally sit down and get on with it. Meh, bleh, what­ever… I always end up get­ting neg­a­tive about this shit.

Maybe I should just admit I seem to write more about not writ­ing, than I do about actu­ally writing.

  • Nick Enlowe

    I’ve been feel­ing the same way lately. If you wan­der over to Merilee’s site, she’s going through the same thing, too. So all three of us. I won­der if the plan­ets are cur­rently mis­aligned or something? Good thing we’ve got years and decades left to our lives, eh? Maybe for some peo­ple writ­ing is just about sit­ting down every once in a while and enjoy­ing it, rather than becom­ing some kind of mass-production word machine. Merilee decided to nip it in the bud, vowing to write 100 words for 100 days, start­ing today. I found that pretty inspir­ing and think I’ll do some­thing sim­i­lar myself.

  • http://ryangsanders.com Ryan G. Sanders

    Hey Nick.

    I might have to con­vert myself into writ­ing some­thing daily, no mat­ter the out­come.  I truly have been busy lately, but aside from the basic con­sumed time, it has had the down­side of giv­ing me psy­cho­log­i­cal rea­sons to not sit down and write:

    I’m tired, I can enjoy myself now. I’m beat, I need to just relax. I’m exhausted, let’s watch some shite on TV.

    When I stop and think about it, I sigh — every time. All the missed chances, all the hours I’ve wasted surf­ing… for noth­ing. Why can’t I just ‘write’. It’s an odd mis-ability.

    Thanks for the com­ment though. The ‘decades left of out lives’ helped remind me I’m not 90 with noth­ing under my belt. I’ve accom­plished a lot, I just need to remem­ber that and not feel so des­per­ate about writ­ing some­times — like it’s the end and I should just give up, instead of giv­ing it time.

  • http://twitter.com/GoblinWriter Lind­say Buroker

    I’m amazed I get any­thing fin­ished at all, because I’m very good at find­ing dis­trac­tions on the internet… ;)

  • http://twitter.com/RG_Sanders Ryan G. Sanders

    Oh no, you read my post about not being able to write! Hehe, how embar­rass­ing. I’m try­ing to get bet­ter, but still the dis­trac­tions come. This year has been a tough one for me, and I’m not sure why.

    Now though, on a bright side, I am try­ing to get my web ser­ial pub­lished in an e-book for­mat. That’s what brought me to your site. I’m con­flicted on all these choices: Ama­zon, Smash­words etc etc. This is a first run for me, trial and error I suppose.

    Thanks for visiting!