The vast majority of the time I can write and get on with my tasks no problem, but occasionally something comes along which totally distracts me in some form of another. Most of the time I blog about these distractions. Sometimes it helps me ‘get over’ whatever it was I found distracting. It doesn’t always but it’s worth a try, and it means I have varied and interesting topics to blog about.
Over my blogging history I’ve talked about all sorts of distractions, from computer games to philosophical topics, characters and even events like abseils. I’m naturally a very easily distracted person. I like the satisfaction of completing things (books take months and sometimes years so short term fixes are often helpful) and computer games are great for this sort of thing. I go save the world or beat up a bad guy and it only takes a few hours. I also like new people and getting to know them, so I’m quite social, but it also means someone elses characters can distract me. It’s not uncommon for me to sit and ponder over a character for a few minutes (or maybe even an hour) after reading or watching something, having conversations with them in my head to try and figure them out based on the information the author has already given me.
On top of all that I’m plugged into quite a large network of people through my church and there are usually several invites per week to go do things, like dinners, games nights and other activites. I also have a writer’s group, bookclub, and other regular commitments, as well as things like paper work, tax info stuff and accounts and all the boring side of my career to stop me from writing whenever I want.
Now these events are often regular enough that I work around them and still get a decent number of hours in each week, but occasionally I find myself distracted by many topics all at once, and this is when my productivity plummets. At the moment, I’m playing Castle Clash a lot (lots of short term satisfaction), planning someone’s hen night, distracted by Mycroft thanks to the new episodes of the BBC series actually giving more info on him and his family. He’s very different to the Mycroft in the original stories and really rather an interesting character. On top of that Mark Gatis and Stephen Moffat like hinting at lots of little things and it’s a lot of fun to speculate at what they might mean. I’m rarely right but I never usually mind, but that’s enough of that.
And it’s that time of the year again. Tax return time. when I have to get all my accounts in order and try to remember where I put everything I need. I don’t really enjoy that part of things so I often let myself get distracted so i don’t have to do it.
Finally, at the moment I’m working on the bonus content for my upcoming anthology and finding it very hard to stay on task. I love putting together my own worlds and thinking about how everything fits together. At the moment I’ve only got to finish my maps and put together the rest of the dates in the timeline so other people can track the changes in ages, but I find myself thinking about family trees, names and their meanings and where I might put this creature I just decided would be good to have attack a character in a book I probably won’t get around to writing for a couple of years.
In short, my head is one very chaotic place to be right now as it goes down a mish mash of threads involving basilisks, tax returns, mycroft, castles, dragons, maps, good things for a group of girls who aren’t particularly girlie to do and all sorts of other ideas and concepts floating around. It has some potentially interesting consequences for the hen night, that’s for sure.