Do I ever think about quitting? Every week, particularly as I watch the deadline for these blog posts come roaring down on me like a runaway freight train [0].<\/p>\n
The Plan [1] was to write the first draft of today\u2019s blog yesterday. After all, I was going to be sitting mostly quietly in a room full of voting equipment for twelve hours, it was a primary so we wouldn\u2019t be terribly busy, and what else was I going to do with myself? Heck, I\u2019d write three and get all caught up! [2] I forgot a vital part of my process, which is that I cannot possibly get into the Flow of writing if there is somebody sitting next to me talking. Not necessarily talking to me, not necessarily talking about anything I need to know are am interested about, just talking. Sometimes just breathing loudly is sufficient to throw me off my game.<\/p>\n
And yet I love Nanowrimo writeins. Probably because we spend good blocks of time where we Do Not Talk Just Write (called sprints). And as lovely as my co-election-ladies are, I could not possibly tell them, \u201cOK, I\u2019m going to do a writing sprint! You need to be quiet now!\u201d [3]<\/p>\n
The writing I do for the Cafe is totally voluntary. I don\u2019t have to do it. I have no goals, nothing to prove. I\u2019m not trying to sell myself as an author. If I quit, I doubt I\u2019d so much as lose a friend [4].<\/p>\n
But I would be very, very disappointed in myself.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The blog is a challenge, a writing exercise, a community builder. The flash fiction weeks just kick my butt all up and down the high street [5], which is good for me because it stretches both my ingenuity as a writer, but also exercises my discipline and my desperation. Putting stuff out there, with my name on it, forces me to take the long, public view; consider my electronic legacy, as it were. After all, future employers will be able to Google me and read these very words [6]. I\u2019m fairly certain my current employer does.<\/p>\n
As for community building? Well, I\u2019m still working on that [7].<\/p>\n
[0] I\u2019m supposed to have them turned in two weeks before they\u2019re posted. You may cue the insane laughter now.
\n[1] My life is like Farscape. There is always a Plan. It\u2019s always a bad plan, it never goes well, people get hurt, and somehow I always come out the other end more broken but wiser. I have friends who think this makes me Cool. Sometimes I worry about my friends.
\n[2] Again, insane laughter.
\n[3] I wonder if I could convince the county clerk to assign me to a precinct next November where all the election officials are also Nanowrimo participants? \u201cHi, I\u2019m here to vote! Where do I sign in?\u201d \u201cHush! We\u2019re in the middle of a word war! You\u2019ll have to wait!\u201d
\n[4] Really, my fellow Confabulators are the nicest, most forgiving people around.
\n[5] Which is why even my regular posts are late\u2014 and short non-fiction is my specialty. The fiction weeks suck up all the schedule slack accrued from the weeks before, and then through a mysterious warping of time and space, suck up the slack from the weeks following as well. At this point, I\u2019ll be caught up in 2049. April, I suspect.
\n[6] Which will it be? \u201cHoly cow!\u201d or \u201cHoly crap!\u201d? And if the latter, do I want to work for them anyway?
\n[7] As I look glumly at the 50 or so unread Confabulator Cafe posts in my newsfeed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Do I ever think about quitting? Every week, particularly as I watch the deadline for these blog posts come roaring down on me like a runaway freight train [0]. The Plan [1] was to write the first draft of today\u2019s blog yesterday. After all, I was going to be sitting mostly quietly in a room […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[895],"class_list":["post-4624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writers-life","tag-quitting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4624","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\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4624"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4624\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}