Weekly Update: 9-24-15 A Normal Week

Announcement: A copy of my first novel, The Changelings, is now available in the library of Brea Olinda High School. For anyone who attends the school, please check it out.

Further Announcement: I'll be selling limited paperback copies of my book at a pop-up boutique in El Dorado High School on October 3rd, from 10:00-11:00. More details to come.

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I'd love it if every time I wrote this blog, I could entertain you with fascinating adventures, beautiful description, or profound thoughts on life.  Unfortunately, I'm human and some (a lot) of my weeks are just plain boring.

I try so hard to be interesting, but then my true nature reveals itself.

Last week, for example, I attended a tax seminar on Tuesday. Now for a select few people in desperate need of information on sales tax in Orange County, it was fascinating. (And for those select few people, I spent most of Wednesday typing up a very thorough blog post, which I'll publish some time in October.) For me, it consumed my writing time and writing energy and was as pleasant as a toothache.

At least I got a short story out of a toothache.

By Thursday, taxes had gotten me so far off schedule, I just threw my hands in the air and yelled, "to hell with it!" (In my head, anyway. As a rule I try not to yell unless something truly atrocious happened. Like when a writer butchers a good book with a bad ending.) I read Three Act Tragedy by Agatha Christie. I should have known better. I have a Christie compulsion. I must read three of her books at one time, or bad things happen.

It's an addiction.

The bad thing that happened was me obsessively hunting down episodes of Agatha Christie's Poirot on YouTube.  All Friday and most of Saturday, I endured annoying side-screens and footage with the bottom layer cut off, but I didn't care. The reptile part of my brain had awakened and craved the blood-spatter of early 20th-century, polite upper-middle class British society.

On Sunday my dad had a retirement party at Ferrell's. I struggled to regain my sanity.

By the time Monday morning opened its bleary, bloodshot eyes, I knew I must atone. I hadn't written a word of my story since Thursday. The guilt weighed on my soul. So, forsaking all others, I toiled laborously on 8 chapters of Three Floating Coffins, until the pendulum had swung in the other direction. I'd worked and overworked myself. I felt balanced and satisfied.

Yay for work!

And that, I suppose, is a pretty typical week. Bouts of productivity, bouts of writing, bouts of procrastination. I thought to extract some moral from the last one: the virtue of solitude, the necessity of refreshing the soul. But, oh, why bother. I got lazy and felt bad about it. End of story.