The Tenth One

So after about two months and ten blog entries (counting this one), we take a moment to quickly survey how things have improved for this intrepidly procrastinating author.

I started writing this blog when very down and depressed due to a lack of income caused by my not being employed. The night I wrote the first entry I had just sent about twenty emails to various employers on craigslist and felt pretty desperate. Imagine my surprise when the next day or so I heard back from one of them and eventually went on to work for the window cleaning company I'm at now. This development has improved my money situation significantly, although I'm still playing a pretty desperate game of catch-up with my bills and money owed to friends and family who loaned me money during my long stretch of joblessness.

The unfortunate side effect of this job is a lack of time for writing the things I want to be writing. You'll notice there has been a real slowdown in blog entries from this last month, that's because I'm working an average of eleven hours or so a day and that's six days a week. It makes writing even this thing pretty difficult, but I think I've already touched on that in an earlier blog entry.

As for the series of stories I started writing this blog to procrastinate from writing, well, that too has slowed down considerably. This development is the most depressing one that has come from my job. I find myself looking over the stories I've already competed instead of working on the current one, picking out countless flaws and grammatical errors. I'm able to fix the grammar, correct the syntax, but the underlying flaws--the bad writing--I can't help but agonize over. The stories all look so bad to me, and I have no way to see them objectively. I find it harder and harder to make myself write them, the more I procrastinate the more I start thinking that the ideas I have are stupid, and that even if they are okay that no one will ever read and enjoy them.

It's all very disheartening.

Still, I don't want to stop. I think that is the important thing. Parts of me see the stories I write and think "yeah this is shit--Twilight is better written than this crap," but another part of me still feels that urge to keep writing. So I suppose as long as I feel that urge to write I'll keep doing it.

Or writing here to procrastinate anyway.

I feel that last line would be a good place to stop the entry, that sort of fancy, thought-provoking stinger I'm so fond of, but I don't feel like being too thought provoking right now. I'm just using this entry as a sort of "state of the union" thing for all my hordes of loyal readers.

So the state is that I am working a lot more, and don't need a blog as much as I used to in order to procrastinate effectively, but I still enjoy writing the blog and writing my fiction, and so I will endeavor to continue to do both. I've heard from one person that I don't have sex with that my blog was entertaining so I suppose that's enough to keep me typing it for at least another month before I get bored and stop.

As for the collection of stories--which are tentatively subtitled Bookhunter--I plan to continue writing those as well. Perhaps I'll be able to tie those two things together a bit more as I move forward, this blog might provide at least a sense of urgency even if not providing any actual urgency about the schedule of writing I'm taking on.

So let me try to lay it out. My plan is to have the current short story I'm working on in the bank by Christmas. With that done I'll have one more story left to write before editing and proofing can start on my entire collection of seven shorts which will hopefully weigh in at about two hundred pages--which I think is a pretty respectable collection for my first venture into attempting to actually make money off of. If that sells anything at all then I'll be able to start cranking out another collection and hopefully have two or three "books" available for purchase by August of next year.

It's also very possible I'll just sit here and watch those deadlines fly by and continue to never ever get anything actually done in my life while complaining about it on the internet.

But that would be no fun, so let's not do that, okay?

(See? still had a stinger)