How I Learned... #8: About Procrastination

You'd think it would be easy to produce a single blog post on a subject vaguely relation to writing once-a-week. You'd think that.

I'm still trying to figure out how to manage it.

I don't suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder. I have several friends who do have to live with ADD, and the work they do every day to focus and get important tasks done genuinely humbles me, because they have a much harder time of it than I do.

I suffer from things like a job where I spend most of my day writing and editing bland government copy. At the end of the day, my brain is so fried from all the sugar-coating and propaganda that it's hard to concentrate on the actual subject of writing.

I suffer from a disconnect between original writing and fanfic writing. Original writing, although it offers the most scope for my talents, always exists in that uneasy place between joy and labor. Fanfic is unmitigated love and squee; instead of doing horrid but thematically appropriate things to my long-suffering original characters, I can take someone else's characters and undo all the horrid but thematically-appropriate things that their actual creator did to them. It's therapeutic in the extreme.

I suffer from compulsions to eat and drink while I work. I suffer from an inability to write without background music, and a linked inability to sit still in the presence of music. I suffer from access to Netflix, to the Internet at large, to a DVD player, to the outside world.

In short: I have a lot of trouble ignoring outside stimuli.

Sometimes.

I also suffer, I must say, from a compulsion towards honesty. And the truth is, I'm so used to putting off things, even things I enjoy doing, that it's hard to break myself of that habit. And I prefer to take so much time to mentally prepare myself to do something, important or not that by the time I've finally worked myself up to doing it, it's too late.

tl;dr

I'm trying, y'all.