Procrastinating (, I am)

In no particular order I’ve checked my mail, looked at what other apps are available for Lion, thought about going to Barnes and Noble to read Vulture’s Picnic or The Waking Dead or anything else that let’s me avoid actually writing. I have 70 pages to read on The Shining and I’d love to fix up my LinkedIn profile. I could keep going forever. I’ve been away from it for too long. I’ve written a couple of entries for this blog, but even that’s a way to stall. When I get like this the only way I know how to break through is writing. When I haven’t been writing every day for the last week, I need to make up for the 1,000 words a day I didn’t do and write 7,000 in one sitting. To get back into the flow of things I don’t care what I say, I just need to say anything at all.

Apparently the trick to writing is to just write.

I’d rather not do the math - but above is a screenshot from the folders in MacJournal, my main writing program. I use it because of its excellent full screen mode. White Text. Black Background. Nothing else.

But I digress - each of those entries above averages 1,000 words. Some are longer. Somer are shorter. And 90% will never see the light of day. P90X is for a blog that lasted a month and Trying to Fail is for a blog I’ll probably start after this one gets more regulated, but Word Warm Ups & Flow are folders entirely dedicated to my practice of writing a 1,000 words before starting to write a script, a blog post, a short story, or anything else. If I’m right about the 1,000 word average (and I am. Don’t test me on this.) I’ve written nearly 400,000 words for myself this last year alone.

That’s not a statistic I’m proud of. Like I said, all but 40,000 for this last year went completely unpublished. They were me procrastinating by way of writing. This is embarrassing.

I put myself in binds like this. Why write the 1,000 at all?

If I don’t, I’m caught with entries like this one - basically me rambling nonsense. This doesn’t feel private. This doesn’t feel right.

And that’s because I have 6,000 words to go before I’m back in the groove again.

I’ll keep wasting time - writing out more entries, stalling by tweaking out my editorial calendar. I expect to spend more time with images than I should. There’s 3 hours to go before I need to take off for my Monday night improv show - the complete opposite from last week’s 13 hour days.

For now, I write. And eventually, I’ll come out ahead.

It consoles me that everyone goes through this exact same process.

Featured Image via Montauk