Yet another post on not writing...

As you may know from following this blog, I have a habit of finding odd hobbies to distract me from writing. I have decided that this is okay. Writing is not my job, at least not yet and having a lot of hobbies makes me a well rounded person…See how I did that? I can totally justify my procrastination with that argument no matter how unimportant or pointless said procrastination is.

My most current form of procrastination is fantasy football. I always thought it was weird, and I didn’t really get it, but my brother-in-law wanted to join an espn league to see what it was like and I figured hey why not try it, its free and I already watch the Vikings every week.

The draft was a learning experience. I ended up drafting seven teams before I was happy with what I got. I did keep up with all of my teams. I rarely watched games but I played very close attention to the bottom little banner thing during the Vikings games.

It was actually a lot of fun. I dealt with injuries and picked up new players, some booms and some busts. I spent a few hours a week trying to figure out who I could add to make the perfect team. I picked up and dropped more players than anyone else in any of my leagues.

In the end only one of my teams sucked. Three of them were one game from making the playoffs and the other three of them actually made it.

Now that the first match up of the playoffs is almost over and I find myself in a weird spot as I wait for Monday Night Football. All three of my teams are in precarious spots.

The Roberts Raiders need Mike Wallace of the Pittsburg Steelers to score less than 10 fantasy points so that they can beat Team Scoregasm.

The Prairie Pirates need Mike’s team mate Antonio Brown to score a whopping 55 points, which I don’t think is very likely. (Scoring break down 10 yards receiving = 1 point & touchdown = 6 points) So he only needs a 310 yard four touchdown game….

Finally team NE Roberts needs the same Antonio Brown to score 19 points, which is doable he had 21 last week, but it also needs Frank Gore the 49ers running back, to score nothing and the Steelers defense to score nothing.

So my best bet is hoping Mike Wallace has an off night while at the same time his team mate Antonio Brown has the best game of his life.

I don't even like the Steelers.

Sometimes I think writing would be easier than procrastinating.

Nano Musings

“How did Nanowrimo go?” You ask with a smile, smile which could be seen as friendly but seems somehow mocking.

“Not good,” I reply, “not good at all.”

Yes, this year’s nanowrimo can be considered a fail, and a big one. I made it to just over half way to my word goal of 50,000 words. I do not consider it an epic fail, I did learn a few things and I have the beginning of what I think will be my best novel to date.

Things I learned

1. I cannot write with the stomach flu

2. I can write with the regular flu, but I am very slow

3. I have lost a bit of my motivation that I had when I started writing

The first two point are pretty self explanatory. I did spend most of November(2 weeks) sick. I also had some fairly busy weekends and a lot to do at work.

But that brings me to my third point. I am just not as motivated as I was when I started writing. The other stuff wouldn’t have mattered last year or the year before. I would have just gotten Nano done. Don’t get me wrong there were some flashes of it. I had three different writing sessions where I wrote 5000+ words in a couple of hours. Of course that means that the other 27 days I got about 10,000 words written, about 400 words a day or so.

So as I sit and reflect on what has changed a few things come to mind. For one instead of organically letting the story come, I am planning out a plot and this novel is much better for it. There are no instances of characters appearing for a chapter and then disappearing. The plot is fairly consistent and I didn’t decided to add a couple of dragons on page 70 to spice it up. In short I am writing a better quality story.

The other problem is a little harder to express. I really want to write a great novel, one that will have wide spread appeal. While writing my first few novels I was positive they were good enough to be published the whole time I was writing them, and only saw the flaws when I went back through to edit. This time I see all the flaws in my novel right after I am done writing. But I know if I go back and fix them now that I will never finish.

This novel  is better than any of my other novels, I am sure of that, but right now I don’t think that is good enough to be published and that is making it hard to motivate myself to write it.

Of course I did get 25,000 words done in a month which really is a step up from the pace I was going at, so maybe I can keep it up and put out a couple of novels a year.