I’m in a brief lull– one book, The Stand In, is launched, (garnering great reviews yet sales are quiet) and the second, Chronicles of the Sanguivorous, The Rising, has been published as a teaser. (The Amazon reviews are quiet so far, but sales are solid.) Chronicles is only the beginning of a novel and a series. That means that I must soon find the guts to finish it. But writing a novel, I’ve discovered, is like jumping down a well. At the bottom of it, you’re on page one and each succeeding page is but one laborious step upward toward that distant light at the top. Only when you write “The End” can you consider yourself safe from the cold and watery dark. It’s so dispiriting to realize that I must again hurl myself down that well, and – let me tell you – I’m mightily resisting the urge. As I’ve stated repeatedly, I love writing but don’t particularly like doing it. What I really like is having written.
It doesn’t help that a bad case of spring fever has attacked me with a vengeance. All I want to do, it seems, is work in my yard, shop and go out to have drinks with friends – usually in the middle of the day. And afterward, I’ll want a nice nap, too. Soon it will be dinner time and cooking will occupy the end of my day. The last thing I’ll want to do is march myself over to the keyboard and disappear down that well.
Usually I’m very disciplined when I write. But it’s a kind of self-imposed hibernation that you’re forced to fall into when you’re writing a novel. It’s a lonely, anti-social process. And I’m about the only writer I know who has tested out to be an extrovert on the Meyers-Briggs personality test. I like people, for God’s sakes. Is that a sin? And like I say, discipline is usually not a problem for me – except for those couple of times a year when all I want to do is play.
Like now.
So I’m going to do what I always do when the fever hits, which is to give into it. My rationale for doing so is that I will accumulate so much guilt by fever’s end that the only way to atone for it is to hurl myself down the well again; it’s a tactic, you see.
At least that’s what I tell myself.
Today I have friends in town and predict that a round of mid-afternoon cocktails looms in my immediate future. Frozen pineapple daiquiris sound good. And then a nap.
What can I do? I’m feverish.
Brad Geagley 
oh, yes, spring is the worst! I have my curtains drawn so I don’t see how warm and inviting it looks outside!
I’m usually self-disciplined while writing, but man alive, what I wouldn’t do to read outside… sigh! must finish this draft first.
good luck to your writing and not being distracted!!
Somehow, I spent an hour picking out moss (MOSS, not even flowers or shrubs) for my itsy-bitsy yard today. But, it’ll drive me nuts if I don’t do it.
I’m avoiding as well. I’m supposed to be writing right now.
We can’t (quite) be hermits, or we’d never have anything to write. JK Rowling wrote (somewhere, her blog maybe) that the idea for Harry Potter hit her on a train ride. So, you don’t HAVE to be at your solitary keyboard like a pupil stuck in detention, writing lines while stealing glances out the window.
Oh, and now I have to go take the Meyers-Briggs test. I’ve never done it, but I’m guessing I’d come out as an extrovert. Know any websites were I can self administer?
I sure do…it’s a variant based on the real test, but it’ll flay you open like a frog in a biology class. Go here http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/jtypes2.asp
I’m an ENFP by the way.
I say, go with the flow! Sometimes, I do my best writing in my head when I’m doing other things.
Oh, Brad. . .you have hit so many nails on the head. I am succumbing to the siren call of the garden, too. In the lush east, it is necessity, lest I be entombed in wild grapes, morning glories and waist deep grasses. However, I am turning my distraction into cash. I am growing healthy vegetables and selling them to others. Sooooo, I don’t benefit from the guilt tactic you describe. Cash reinforces my distraction. Today I am under the weather and catching up on blog reading. Those frozen fruit daiquiris sound so good — you know, to bring down my fever. 🙂
Bonus points for the MST3K pic, sir!