{"id":2409,"date":"2012-04-27T11:00:42","date_gmt":"2012-04-27T16:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/?p=2409"},"modified":"2012-04-27T11:00:42","modified_gmt":"2012-04-27T16:00:42","slug":"a-hole-with-no-bottom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/?p=2409","title":{"rendered":"A Hole With No Bottom"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Ahahahahahaha.<\/p>\n<p>I only laugh because it hurts when I think about all the things I do when I ought to be writing. I&#8217;m terrible at task management. I tend to put things off until the last minute, or tell myself that I&#8217;m going to do one thing and then proceed to spend thirty minutes stalking that Ridiculously Photogenic Guy meme. (I was there when it was cool! I never get in on a meme until after it&#8217;s already lame, so that was a very exciting week for me.)<\/p>\n<p>The weird thing about posts like this, is that I&#8217;m sure in the preceding four days my fellow writers have cited legitimate reasons for not having time to write, and much more eloquently. So I&#8217;m going to go the immature little girl route: other things are cool, and writing is hard.<\/p>\n<p>I like to say that my work prevents me from spending as much time from writing as I&#8217;d like, but frankly I&#8217;m lying to us both. There are times, when I need to work more to make more money, where I don&#8217;t have time to do anything but work. But that is not my average day. My average day has <em>tons<\/em> of opportunities to write (and edit) in it, if only I were better at task management.<\/p>\n<p>These are the things I do, when I could be writing instead.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Tend to the child. Sometimes we have to leave the house. Sometimes he just demands my attention <em>righthisverysecond!<\/em> It&#8217;s not uncommon that he will literally climb up my back. Once he just laid on top of my laptop.<\/li>\n<li>Watching <em>Grey&#8217;s Anatomy<\/em> on Lifetime in the middle of the day, because my life is a clich\u00e9 and if I sit with the child on the couch, he won&#8217;t be angry.<\/li>\n<li>Tumblr.<\/li>\n<li>Watching TV when I swore it was just on for background noise.<\/li>\n<li>Finding something web-related to test.<\/li>\n<li>Google Reader.<\/li>\n<li>Reading the comments even though I know it&#8217;ll only make me mad.<\/li>\n<li>Facebook.<\/li>\n<li>Write 95% of a blog post, then draft it. Feel guilty about drafting it.<\/li>\n<li>Twitter.<\/li>\n<li>Clean something. Maybe.<\/li>\n<li>Stare at open document. Commence gross sobbing.<\/li>\n<li>Change my desktop environment. (In the month of November I changed my distribution <em>three times.<\/em>)<\/li>\n<li>Install program I will only use once.<\/li>\n<li>Spend 3 days picking a new media player.<\/li>\n<li>Drink heavily with friends.<\/li>\n<li>Recover from drinking heavily with friends.<\/li>\n<li>Game.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It&#8217;s not fun to acknowledge that your lack of writing time is entirely your own fault &#8212; and I recognize that in myself. Whenever a writer gives the advice just stop wasting time and write, I have to remind myself that they can&#8217;t literally look through my computer screen and know that I&#8217;m skimming the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tumblr.com\/tagged\/beard\"><em>beard<\/em><\/a> tag on Tumblr when I said I would write 1500 words. I don&#8217;t work full-time, and if I had more discipline I could have done about twice as much with my writing as I have. In some ways, it becomes cyclical. When I&#8217;m in the habit of writing, I write. When I&#8217;m not in the habit, I tend to let it slide. <em>No, it&#8217;s cool, I&#8217;ll write tomorrow.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m happier when I write. The longer I go without writing, the more useless I feel, and the more likely I am to watch <em>Grey&#8217;s Anatomy<\/em> and think, &#8220;They can&#8217;t possibly be airing these reruns in order. This makes no sense. Why did that guy knock up that lesbian doctor? Weren&#8217;t they moving to Africa in the last episode?&#8221; And then the worse I feel, the less likely I am to write.<\/p>\n<p>Next thing I know, I&#8217;ve memorized my entire day&#8217;s television schedule.<\/p>\n<p>Cyclical.<\/p>\n<p><em><\/em>This is why I rely so heavily on programs designed to literally block out everything else. It&#8217;s why I put on headphones and ignore the world when I write. It&#8217;s why I stay up late at night and get things done when my whole family is asleep. It&#8217;s why I thrive on NaNoWriMo and coffee shops and the world&#8217;s most supportive husband. Left to my own broken devices, in a normal environment where most normal people seem to be able to function, I can&#8217;t seem to make it work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ahahahahahaha. I only laugh because it hurts when I think about all the things I do when I ought to be writing. I&#8217;m terrible at task management. I tend to put things off until the last minute, or tell myself that I&#8217;m going to do one thing and then proceed to spend thirty minutes stalking [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[1113,1166],"class_list":["post-2409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writers-life","tag-task-management","tag-time-management"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2409"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2409\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}