procrastination

Why Write, Dammit?!

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The Writing Hand

I’m not a very good writer, by which I don’t only mean it in regards to what I’ve written, but also and mostly to how I’ve written.

The act of writing pains me and I’ll pretty much do anything mostly legal I can to get myself out of it. I guess the best way to express how I feel about writing is: I don’t like having to write, but I truly love having had written.

But still, I don’t really know why I do feel the need to write except that there is some unidentified force and/or source beyond my reach and comprehension that obliges me to do so.

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Preparing for the End

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As you may or may not be aware, the end of the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy will be officially and finally declared on September 20, 2011.

I honestly am very happy, and more than a little apprehensive, that its end is coming.

Additionally, in the spirit of my shtick, I am also not as honestly very happy, and a little more than apprehensive, that I have until September 20, 2011, to complete and release my novel THE SEA TRIALS OF AN UNFORTUNATE SAILOR.

Why do I have only until September 20, 2011, to complete and release my novel, I hear you ask.

Well, how else can I best exploit for my own bloated self-interests the pain, suffering, and humiliation of thousands of those who served their country during the course of the life of the humiliating DADT policy than by releasing on or about the date of DADT’s death so that I can best leverage the public’s increased interest in the issue a book with themes that attempt to illustrate the same pain, suffering, and humiliation that those who served their country during the course of the life of the humiliating DADT policy experienced, I answer.

Key word in all that bumbling nonsense in the last paragraph: “attempt.”

But fear and puke not, for those of you whose stomach I just curdled:

For I am known for setting and committing myself to firm and fixed deadlines and then easily and breezily rationalizing them away as their date flies by and the work remains woefully incomplete.

And I certainly do have much woeful work on the novel yet for me not to complete between now and September 20, 2011.

Until then, you can check out the first five chapters of THE SEA TRIALS OF AN UNFORTUNATE SAILOR at the “free reads” page, if you feel so inclined and/or charitable to my cause.

Guilt Calculus

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Now that I finally made the move and mothballed Marrowish, I feel a wonderful sense of relief and freedom. Instead of feeling guilty about not posting articles regularly on two sites, I only have to feel guilty about one. That’s a quick and easy 50% reduction of guilt in my life.

Not bad.

However, because I’ve integrated all of Marrowish’s posts and what not into this site, there is now much work for me to do: fix link structures, update categories, delete unwanted posts, realign the pages, and on and on. Actually, blog maintenance and upkeep is something I enjoy and when doing it, I can lose hours and hours of my life without even noticing.

I think it’s fair to say that one reason I enjoy doing it so much is because it gives me an excuse not to write. Of course when I’m not writing when I know I should be…more guilt.

Not to mention all the hours I sink into trying to learn GIMP, the open source, Photoshop-like photo editing software I use. I don’t know what it is about photo editing software, but it kicks my butt. Which is why it is so hard for me to create decent looking banners and logos. Which is why the ones I do create tend to look like crap. Which is why I’m constantly changing them.

I find that my restless indecisiveness nicely compliments my resolute procrastination.

I don’t get much traffic here so I know all of the changes and upgrades I make mostly go unnoticed; but I’m sure at least a couple of inadvertent visitors must have noticed that I have had about 5000 different banners on this site in the past month.

The good news is, I think I’m finally getting the hang of GIMP and finally getting the site somewhat presentable so hopefully I will be spending less time monkeying around with all the maintenance and banner editing and more time writing. Which means, of course…less guilt.

Though…I have been meaning to learn more about the intricacies of search engine optimization.