What to do What to do

[anatolew]

So I'm looking at my list of projects to work on, divided up into categories:

• household (like putting together the furniture we bought two year ago, and for which I never have a long enough block of time)


• bureaucratic (filing and tracking down logins and passwords for financial accounts that I haven't had the heart to look at for the past year)
• musical (must practice guitar and violin, but my screeching and sawing attracts feral alley cats)


• and finally, creative.

The last category is the saddest for me. In that list are notes for two Web sites, 21 unfinished short stories, 2 unfinished plays, four different unfinished comic books (okay, graphic novels), and 20 poems that are kind of finished but are so terrible they'll never see the light of day.

So I have to ask myself, what have I been doing for the past 20 years, and what's stopping me now that I've finally moved past the sleep-deprivation of the past 5 years? I have a solid two hours between the time Martha goes to bed and I pass out myself, which should be time to get something done, but it seems like that as soon as I wrap my brain around something I want to get done, I'm exhausted, the eyes grow heavy, and it's time for bed.

It occurs to me that my computer might be the problem--there are so many built-in distractions when I have the whole Internet and a massive iTunes/movie/TV show backlog calling to me. But when I've tried to move away from the infernal device, I find that I can't write quickly enough to keep up with my brain, nor neatly enough to be able to read the notes back later.

So how to focus and get at least one writing project done? I'm always open to ideas...