...
Do you have days when you feel like you've achieved nothing, even after getting through what might appear to be a lot? It's the ancillary stuff that's the bugbear of anyone who simply wants to get on with what's important, and that's writing.
You know, sit down in front of a blank page on the computer, for on your writing desk, if you have one, ready for the words to come.
Except there's the email to check.
Then there are ads to be sent out on Twitter and the general Twitter feed to look at just to keep up with what's happening out there.
Then there's the news usually that arrives on my desktop computer, the feed from the major papers around the world, for me, the New York Times, in the US, the Times in The UK and the Australian, in my country.
And, dammit, each has a challenging crossword that I really don't have time to do, well, not in the morning.
Then there's the stuff that has to be done around the house, I'm home but my wife still works so there's washing, cooking, and domestics to be done which eats into the day.
Sometimes it's not until mid-morning before I get to sit down with a cup of tea.
The point is, it's not conducive to writing during the day because you can't get a run at it, time enough to think about what you're going to write before committing it to paper.
That is, before the phone rings with another scammer, and breaks your concentration. Right, I hear you, cut the phone off.
So, three phone calls later, I'm about to give up. It's time to get the dinner on with family coming. Perhaps I'll have a few bottles of beer instead.
This is why I write at night, sometime after ten. No phone calls, no distractions. Well, that's not necessarily true because what you didn't get done earlier had a way of backing up if you don't get through it in a timely manner.
Perhaps I'll get a blog post or two done, another episode of the trip to China, upload another photo to Instagram and look at the current novel I'm in the middle of editing.
By that time it will be two am, way past anyone's decent time to go to bed. In fact, it's ten past two, and I've got an early morning.
No comments:
Post a Comment