Back In It

I'm going to pick up on The Temple of the Red Velvet Jesus again. I need to get this finished. So I can be published and awesome and totally non-gloating by rubbing my book in your face.

And screw Script Frenzy. I'm just not feeling the screenwriting thing anymore. Oh, well.

So after I awake. At some point during the day as I will be very busy doing whatever, I will pull out my manuscript and get to work. Not working on it makes me feel unaccomplished and lazy. And if there's anything I hate, it's feeling lazy. (That's right, I'm a *procrastinating* workaholic. Is conflict, yes?)

At this point I'm not entirely sure how my little fledgling novel is going to end up. I've made so many changes (in my head) that I don't know where it's going. But I look forward to finding out.

I blame Twitter for this sudden desire for productivity. Since hockey season (or at least the Thrashers' season) ended I've been following more writers. There are so many writers on Twitter who either have books out or will have them out soon. I want to be one of those. I want to be published. I want to be something.

But first. I need to sleep.

Here's to dreams of publishing.

Lent Update

I know how for some people a Lent promise is more like a New Years' (Year's? Years?) Resolution in that it typically gets a lot of attention for about a week or so then is promptly forgotten. Not so for me.

Even though I have not posted since 14 March, I have not gotten my Lent promise out of my head: to NOT procrastinate.

I must admit. I have been doing a LOT of procrastinating. Take this post for example: I started writing this post about a month ago and have never been able to finish it. And now it is the day before Easter. Technically Lent is over. And I don't feel like I've come anywhere close to accomplishing my goal of not procrastinating. I feel a little like this instead.

So how did my Lent "experiment" go?

MASSIVE EPIC FAIL.

I don't know why I'm such a procrastinator. I don't know why I like to put myself under unnecessary stress. It's a bad habit that, for the sake of my health and sanity, needs to change. I don't know how I'm going to do it but it's something that must be done. If Lent can't cure my procrastinating ways, what can?

What is Lent? AKA: I'm already breaking my promise

According to Wikipedia's Lent page, because it's SOOO accurate:

Lent in the Catholic tradition, is the period of the liturgical year leading up to Easter. Lent is a time of sacrifice for Jesus. The traditional purpose of Lent is the preparation of the believer — through prayer, repentance, almsgiving and self-denial — for the annual commemoration during Holy Week of the Death and Resurrection of Jesus, which recalls the events linked to the Passion of Christ and culminates in Easter, the celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

And as I stated in my previous post, I'm trying my darndest to give up procrastinating for Lent. How is that going? Not too well.

Last night I pulled an all-nighter staying up until 5am to not just finish, but WRITE my speech about the Mozart Effect (MOZART!!!!!). I put that speech off for so long. I'd know about the speech since the first day of class in January. We were officially handed out the assignment about three weeks ago. I finally started writing it less than 24 hours away from the due date. Despite all of this I did surprisingly well.

I have no idea why I can't just sit down and do the work assigned to me in a reasonable amount of time. I don't know why I become so productive when there's hardly enough time to do the work. I guess I work well under pressure. That might be why I did so well in NaNoWriMo, a competition where you stretch the limits of your creative writing ability.

For NaNoWriMo I got off to a great start, another thing I'm very good at. There was no school, there was nothing else to do, and since both the internet and cable were out there were no distractions. But halfway through November, when the telly came back on and I could do something more besides watching Dr. Wayne Dyer on PBS for six hours, I began goofing off again. Then school started back. I went an entire week without writing a word. And that added up tremendously.

In the last week of NaNoWriMo I was once again in a mad rush. I WANTED THOSE WINNER GOODIES! (Even though I did not yet know what they would be.) Things started working out again, the cable and internet went off again, Dr. Amen and his Brain in Love program came on so much that I had memorized half of the 2-hour program, and I got back to work. I finished at 1:50am the day of the deadline and verified my word count at school. The site sent me this:

Among other things...

This was the biggest project I've ever finished. This was the first time I was ever able to finish anything of real importance for me. I was so proud of myself, despite the fact that by the last day of the 30-day contest, I no longer had the mental capacity to form a complete sentence on paper. My fingers literally locked up over the keyboard every time I tried to type, but I got it done.

Which brings me to the point of this excessive rambling: Procrastination can be a good thing. Procrastinating is what forced me to have to be creative and pull words out of my ass and put them on paper in a mostly comprehensible manner.

But it certainly would've gone a lot better had I just been able to get the words on the paper in the first place.

So come on, Lent. Bring it.