Almost two weeks ago, I finally finished the second draft of Connections (or is it the first draft? I’m not quite sure. I wrote it, then rewrote it, so maybe it is the second draft), printed a copy (Office Depot, $45), and separated it into ten-ish-page chunks. As it turns out, I was just paving a road to hell because since then the chunks have sat in my living room, nearly untouched (I did manage to sort of start marking up the first page. It’s two hundred and twenty pages).
Any of you who have been following this blog or know a writer in any capacity should not be surprised by this. If given the choice between actually writing and literally anything else, most of us will nearly always choose anything else, even it that includes cleaning the house or staring at the wall rethinking your life choices. By the current status of my house, it’s pretty obvious which of those two I more regularly choose.
Read more: Driven to…SomethingHere’s the thing: there are so many distractions! I mean, anything can be a distraction if you try hard enough, but in this modern world, you don’t even have to try very hard.
Case in point: this photo is from my loft today.
It started snowing this morning and still hasn’t stopped. I guess we won’t be grilling our dinner tonight! My daughter and I managed to make it out to the grocery store and back before the streets were covered, but now it has become Constant Weather Update status here.
“Yep, still snowing.”
*My daughter takes a protractor outside to measure the snowfall (don’t judge. It’s science)* “Four inches!”
“Look at the size of those flakes!” Seriously, they were huge.
But what else is there to do, except maybe brew a cup of tea and write a blog post (which is really just another distraction from the novel I should be editing)?
Remember cable and two hundred channels of absolutely nothing on worth watching? Now it’s six-plus streaming services with TONS of stuff to watch. You could spend hours just flipping through the selections adding them to My Stuff or My List or whatever you call it (I will neither confirm nor deny that I have spent too much time doing exactly this), which is really just a way of avoiding selection paralysis (I WILL admit that I frequently suffer from that).
Writers also must have non-writing hobbies, which are really just other distractions. Except reading. That counts as writing. Don’t come at me. I don’t make the rules.
Of course, none of these very real distractions can hold a candle to the distractions we make for ourselves. Most of these are contained in other non-television electronic devices: the computer, tablet or phone.
OH MY GOD THE PHONE.
Even a phone on silent (let’s be real, no one has turned the sound on their phone ON since 2018) AND with notifications turned off still needs to be picked up and checked every three minutes. Phone FOMO is a very real thing.
But that person won’t DIE if I don’t answer RIGHT THIS SECOND, right?!? They might not, but I probably will. I’m almost certain of this. Friends, please don’t read this as STOP TEXTING ME. Please continue to text me. You are only a distraction insofar as I am making you one. So it’s totally my fault. Not yours.
Does this mean that I’m going to smash the Publish button for this post and get immediately to work on the novel I should be editing because all of you are SO EXCITED to read it? Have you been paying any attention at all? It’s highly unlikely.
But I will finish it. Someday. I promise.
Until then, I’m making a valiant effort to manage my distractions. I’m likely failing. But I continue to try. To be fair, most of the things I allow to distract me are those that bring me joy and make me happy, so even when I find them maddening, I also try to embrace them. I hope you are making time for the distractions that make you happy.
Vickie Jarman 