Here's a daunting little device...

Been busy as a springtime hive of honeybees the last few, trying to get as many words on paper as I possibly can, as well as updating devices and files lost in the last computer debacles of late, getting ready for the new school year, and dealing with my lone student I gave an incomplete to last semester because he wound up having emergency surgery on his appendix in the final week of school.

(No worries: He's fine now, but they sure kept him a spell at the hospital. He didn't get out until the final week of December. That was nearly a month as best I can tell, and I actually went to see him not long after his surgery in the first week of December.)

But I'm staying plenty busy, anyhow. Kinda irritating at times how others don't seem to want to leave me alone when I'm working, but it's what I get, I guess, for setting up shop out here in the living room in front of God and everyone.

Much as Stephen King told us to do in On Writing (which is a fine book, if you haven't read it), I'm holed up in a corner, nose to wall with nothing but a keyboard nearby. Good way to keep the focus, but it also traps your ass whenever someone blocks your only way out, and now that my hidey hole has been found out, it can be hard to keep the creative juice sputtering along for all the interruptions sometimes. But that's another story...



If the writing doesn't do me in, this might.

To keep myself on the task at hand--namely, getting that damn master's thesis/book written by my given deadline--I found a digital countdown contraption to keep myself properly motived. Or stressed the fuck out. Whichever happens first, I guess.

That certainly ain't much time left, particularly when you've managed to successfully put it off for at least a quarter century now. 

Plus, it ain't like washing the dishes or hauling out the trash, both of which have end, eventually. Writing, especially my own, is something I could've always done better. It is in my mind, anyhow. There's always a better--or at very least, different--turn of phrase, a tighter edit, a stronger verb, a cleaner approach... The list of Iwishis (pronounced eye-wish-eye, but plural) is long and tedious. But it's also loud and oft repeated inside my head as I write. Always has been.

What? You still hung up on that dishwashing comment?

I figure it like this: I don't care if you wash each dish in the whole neighborhood, you eventually come to spot when you've done them all.  Sure, somebody probably dirtied them again, but that's not my concern here. I was attempting to prove a point, not debate housekeeping.

Besides, I was very careful to keep my references to the flatware, pots and pans, and drinking vessels all in the singular while referencing them in my commentary. Doing otherwise would be ludicrous. I'm trying to write stories here, not start a town service.

It's still notta lotta time, though. After this particular week, I'm back to teaching everyday and taking classes of my own again. Time  I dedicate to just this project and nothing more will be sliced something tremendous.

Must. Stay. Focused...