Who's In Charge Here?

If I don't write something here soon, my son will tell me that I'm not writing. I don't even have the excuse that I've been working on my essays. I have been playing. Shamelessly playing. A friend introduced me to My Writers Circle and I have far more fun with that than I do with actually working.

I'm working on a third year of essays. I've figured out many things while working on the first two years. I have to keep track of what I'm doing or I might write up the same event twice. That's not really horrifying, but I don't want to make a practice of it.

I've been printing out calendars and writing my topics in the box provided for each day. On the second year, I had to put in the years I've already used in order to make it easier to not repeat topics. The third year mean two dates. I barely have room to write what my topic is any more.

Luckily for me, the year 2008 is a leap year. I write an essay for February 29 and need a space to track that date as well. So I bought a small book with enough lines to keep this up for 14 years. But that meant that I had to fill in two years worth of topics. That took me all day. I had writer's cramp – something that doesn't happen with a keyboard.

So I got back to work with actual writing. But it was more fun to play on MWC and I did quite a bit of that. Eventually, more through guilt than desire, I wrote an essay for my day not-job. Then I realized why I need an accurate 2008 calendar.

I only write up the topics for Monday, Wednesday, and Friday because those days my abbreviated essay is published in RGQ. I've been doing this for almost two years now and filling in off days in the hope of creating a book gives me some structure to my days. But the only essays I NEED to write are for three days a week. I need to know which numbers fall on which days. So I need a calendar.

In order to waste more time, I found a calendar all on one page in the Microsoft template section. But I wanted to highlight the Monday, Wednesday, and Friday columns. So I played with that, found that the template had some odd shading in the Friday columns, fixed that, printed it out, only had nine months done and finished the last three, printed it again, and was too tired to continue writing.

Except that I went back to MWC and wrote up a short story thing there. I enjoyed myself. It is still a creative outlet. I'm more than two months ahead on RGQ essays. I feel guilty. I don't know why I keep pushing myself to write ahead. A month would be sufficient. What I should be doing with my time is polishing a query letter and seeing if I can get Little Bits of History, Vol. 1 published. I've reworked the thing twice now. I know I could continue to polish. I could be Leonardo da Vinci with the Mona Lisa and never finish.

So I'm filled with shoulds. I should write my essays. I should write on my blog. I should work on a query letter. I should clean the house and do laundry. I should walk the dog. I should choose a book for the Reading Club. Instead, I will post this and nip on over to MWC and see what's new there. But I will throw in a load of laundry, too.