On Oil-Filled Space Heaters

It's been cold lately. 

Oh, I suppose it's all relative; for example, the weather here is an Unmentionable, comparable to the likes of Valdemort, when speaking to my East Coast Friends...though I suppose in this case I'm not afraid of one of the Unforgivable Curses, and instead... the pity.

"Oh, honey.  it's 37 degrees over there?  Well, we just had a blizzard and sleet and it was raining muskrats and also the kids had a day off from school because insert random apocalyptic event here.  You Californians are too cute!"

And if I mentioned that to my friends in Hawaii they'd be zipping up their parkas just thinking about it.

But I digress.  Today's blog topic is about procrastination.  

I've received a lot of writing advice over the years, and by far the most common, and the most irritating to hear is, "write a little something every day".  Irritating because you know. Obviously you won't get your project finished if you don't work on it.  DUH.   It's like someone standing next to you at the train stop pointing at the sky and saying, "it's blue", (DUH) when what you really want to know is, What type of cloud is that?  Is it actually Karl?  Strange that that murder of crows just flew across the sky.  Is that a sign? When's the train coming, because this person just randomly told me the sky was blue and I want to sit far, far away from him on this train.

These are my thoughts as an example.  You probably won't have the same thoughts, nor would some random person speak to you in this manner.  Best to gauge the situation and move away from said person if you're not comfortable, by the way.  Be safe and aware!

But yes.  That Advice.  So you see that piece of advice is incomplete, because it should actually go like this: "Write every day.  DO NOT STRESS if it's only a sentence, a word, or an idea, you are NO LESS OF A PERSON for not having written enter insanely large number here pages today because you are working on your project! AND DON'T EXPECT IT TO BE PERFECT!  It will not be, so there. That's what future edits are for."

I'm still trying to follow this advice, every day.  It's rough going, because there are days where my mind will come up with any little excuse to avoid imperfect writing, like cleaning the house, or OH that new recipe in the latest Bake From Scratch magazine I've been meaning to try, or that paint drying on the wall is so fascinating or... Squirrel!

Or fingers being too cold to write.

37 degrees, my East Coast Friends. 

It sure feels cold to me.

I live in an old, drafty house, and we are saving money by not turning on the central heat because well, it's expensive.  And ineffective.

But my mind has a point about the cold fingers.  So I'm waiting for my oil-filled space heater to come in the mail, and in the meantime I'm getting to work early to write, because there's central heating there.  Yesterday I wrote a full three paragraphs and it was glorious.

Perhaps, sometime in the future, I'll go deeper into perfection and how your mind will never think it exists in your writing, and so you have to distract it with things, otherwise you're working on that same project for years.  It's wasteful, and your mind has a habit of making you feel discouraged and ready to throw in the towel.

But this is a blog post about procrastination and cold fingers.  So we'll save that for another day, hopefully when my oil-filled space heater arrives.