Writer’s Block

I thought I’d get one hell of a lot more accomplished this past weekend than I actually did. After all, Pam was taking the girls down to Virginia Beach for the weekend — I’d have plenty of time to get a lot of work done. Obviously, as evidenced by the past few entries, I managed to see four movies (way above my usual average), but that wasn’t quite what I had in mind.

To be fair, I got a lot of yard work done, washed several loads of laundry, emptied the dishwasher, took out the garbage, gave the cat her insulin shots, bought more cat litter, picked up the second season of Project Greenlight on DVD, and cleaned out the air filter and dirt trap on the heat pump, but that’s not what I was hoping for either.

I’ve got a list of at least five writing projects on my immediate to-do list. And no, this doesn’t count as one of them. This is easy (well, at least relatively so); I just write whatever I want to. Sure, I recently set a goal for myself to write about the movies I watch (which I may yet come to regret), but it can still be pretty free-form; it’s not like I have to research a full-length review (and yes, a full-length review is one of those projects; three of them, actually). And let’s not consider that whole Senator e-mail address thing — sure, that took a lot of work, but mostly, I’m just babbling here.

Of those five writing projects, I finished... one. Yes, it was the one that I absolutely had to finish this weekend, so I suppose I’m capable of at least some prioritization. But I’m having some real trouble getting a lot of these off the ground. In reality, circumstances have allowed them to slide without real consequence (in other words, I’m not exactly learning a lesson here), but I want to get these done. And not just because I can check them off the daily list on my Palm (which reminds me — gotta pay that Diner’s Club bill). It’s seriously demoralizing to constantly have this list of unfinished projects on my plate.

At work, I’ve come to accept that some projects will just never get done; it’s been one of the toughest things to deal with, but one I’ve had to come to grips with in terms of being a manager — you do what you can, but you have to be realistic: If a client doesn’t care about a project, then it’s always going to be pushed to the bottom of the priority list. Until either the client forgets about it altogether or decides they actually do care about it, in which case it’s likely to be rethought to such a degree that it’s really a whole new project.

In any case, if you’re one of those people who’s waiting for me to finish one of those writing projects (and I figure that’s at least three of you reading this right now), I apologize. I’m not trying to stick your projects into that never-finished category, especially since, in the long run, it’s mostly myself I’m hurting by not completing them. But it’ll still be a while. (Especially since I don’t relish the thought of being apart from Pam and my little girls again in the immediate future. The cats are nice company, but I’m lonely; thankfully they return today.)

So much for my quitting my day job and becoming a writer on a full-time basis, eh?