Not Quite What I Had in Mind...

I try not to make New Year's resolutions, because I always end up feeling like a total failure when I don't live up to them. I can still remember when I was a kid, every New Year's Eve, my dad would break all his cigarettes in half and announce that he was going to quit... and after two weeks of hell, he'd be back to smoking like a chimney.

I prefer to make goals for the year. So one of this year's goals was to whittle down my virtual pile of To-Be-Read books on my Kindle. I joined Goodreads last year, and noticed that the M/M Romance Group had a challenge/game posted called Whips and Kisses, which is sort of like Snakes and Ladders (or Chutes and Ladders for those of you who didn't grow up immersed in Brit culture). You roll a die, you move your marker, and whatever space you land on is the title of a list. You go to the list and pick out a book and read it. I thought this would be a great idea, because it's a lot easier to pick from, say ten or twelve books, than it is to pick from several hundred.

Well, being the organizational demon that I am, I had to go through and look at all the lists and decide if I even had enough books to attempt it.

This turned out to be a huge mistake. I kept clicking on intriguing covers and titles, reading reviews, and before I knew it, I'd added a couple of dozen books to my To-Be-Read pile.

Hmm. Not off to a great start, here...

Creative Procrastination

So it's been two weeks that I've had people in my office. Playing video games. Munching candy. Talking to (at) me while I'm trying to work. Arguing over whose turn it is to play Xbox... and whose turn it isn't to do dishes.

Okay, actually? It's more like three weeks, if you count the week before xmas, when Husband Beast decided to "work from home" (read: perch in my office) three out of the five work days I thought I would have to write.

So I'm sort of really needing some quiet time to get down to business.

Today I finally got them all out the door. And it was quiet. And there was no After-Vacation Cleanup like there was yesterday. And I could write. Except that when I sat down to write, I discovered that I had a pressing need to:

1. Change the beds.
2. Do the associated laundry.
3. Go to the grocery store to buy stuff that I don't need until Thursday.
4. Wind all the yarn for the Offensively Long Rainbow Stocking Cap I am planning to knit.
5. Go to the yarn shop and buy a set of knitting needles that I am realistically not going to need for three weeks.
6. Chat with the yarn shop owner about how I really should be writing.
7. Get a batch of bagels started even though I don't actually need them yet.
8. Dither over lunch (I hate lunch—can't I just drink chai lattes all day and have dinner?)
9. Consider cleaning and organizing every closet in the house.

If I can actually justify writing today, it's going to be a miracle.