I finally finished the work I brought home. La-de-freaking-da.
This morning on the train, I had an idea for a short story. Science fiction, this one. It was fully formed — I have the beginning, the middle, and the end. I typed it into an email on my laptop and sent it to my personal email account before the train got to Union Station, so at least I won’t lose it; it’s a good idea, just the kind of thing I used to read in Analog and Asimov’s (and still do, when I have time to pick up an issue).
Great. I’m delighted. Over the holidays, I intended to write a professional article I have been putting off for a year; I got part way through it, but didn’t finish. Then I got the idea for Meet the Larssons, and dropped the article to work on that (the novel is much more fun than the boring article, anyway, and doesn’t require me to read any cases). Now I’ve got this damn story idea nagging at me — “Oh, work on me for a while, I’m just a short story, how long can it take? Then you can go back to the novel. It won’t be any time at all.”
I don’t know how real writers do it, but this is always my problem with projects — the next project comes along, and it’s all shiny and new, and the old project (in the novel’s case, all of five days old) seems so blah in comparison, that I end up abandoning both the old and new projects rather than make a choice.
Enough of that. I’m 38 years old, and my life is never going to get less busy than it is now. If I’m going to be a “writer” I need to actually do some “writing,” and not just use my writing as an excuse to sit on my ass in front of my laptop even more than I already do. The new story can wait until I have made some solid progress on the novel draft. I will not touch the short story until March, and then only if the novel draft is acceptably far along (as determined by the accountants of PriceWaterhouseCoopers).
That said, now I’m tired and going to bed. Additional Meet the Larssons word count for the day: nada.
The Unfocused Life 