Cheese and Beans on Toast

As I write this, I’m playing blackjack against myself. I’ve got some cheese and beans on toast on a plate and in another minute or so I’ll have a nice mug of tea, but the bulk of my focus is on the game at hand. Lately I’ve been feeling a lot like playing five card stud. It’s absolutely my game of choice, but unfortunately not many people know how to play. If you bring up the subject of poker, they assume you want to play Texas Hold Em, which has got to be the most womanly form of poker I have ever laid my eyes on. But really that’s the smaller issue going against five card stud – a many-sided whammy of heat wave of death, people on vacation, lack of automotive transport, and the fact that no one seems to know how to or really want to play five card stud means there’s no hope of poker. So instead, I’m sitting here playing blackjack against myself. Losing, too, if you want to count DealerMe as separate from PlayerMe.

I’ve tried to be productive today. Not long after I woke up I opened the document with my latest WIP. I even have been productive, in a way. Usually I do the dishes at the end of night before bed, but this weekend I felt like being lazy and let them all pile up until after breakfast this morning. So I finally washed the dishes and cleaned up the millions of soda cans I left lying around. Yes, I’ve been a pig. One of those weeks I guess. But I haven’t actually done any work on the story. It’s okay, I tell myself. It’s only one in the afternoon, and with no obligations whatsoever you could stay up all night if you really wanted to. Who knows? Maybe I will. Maybe I’ll start writing at ten or eleven and carry on into the small hours.

More likely, however, is that I won’t make a lot of progress on anything. I still have the document with my latest WIP open – sitting minimized, technically. However, I also have Twitter open, am playing blackjack against myself, have just pulled up the youtube of a band I like to listen to some of their music, and I have a DVD of one of my favorite movies sitting on top of the TV because I feel like watching it later. The only reason I’m not watching it now is because the World Cup final is going to start in fourteen minutes. My money’s on Spain, but the Netherlands certainly have a real chance. It’s going to be a good game. Or at least, it ought to be. Oh, and I’m still working on reading through The Bodysnatchers, which is still sitting in the reading/cats’ room.

The short of it is there are a lot of distractions and few motivators. It’s not that I don’t want to write – I very much do. I even have in my head all of the events and more or less the words from right where I’ll be picking up writing to, I don’t know, two chapters down the line maybe? I kind of want to hold off on introducing one of the important characters until somewhere in the chapter three to six range; preferably on the latter end if I can help it. It’s just that the prospect of sitting on the piano stool eating cheese and beans on toast while drinking scalding hot tea is much more appealing than writing. That’s probably a bad thing.

In the process of cracking my neck I just noticed the graduation balloon is still sitting in the dining room. Firstly, how I’ve failed to notice its continued existence is beyond me. Secondly, I am amazed we even still have that thing. I’m amazed it’s even still inflated. Anyway, tangent over…

Ultimately I should be thankful I don’t have a deadline for this book. Theoretically I could take the next eighty years to write it. I really hope I don’t, and I seriously doubt I will, but I could if I felt like it.

Still, I feel like I probably should assign myself some sort of deadline. Unemployed life is a bad educator. I woke up at six o’clock this morning, went for a run, then sat around doing nothing on my laptop for three hours, then spent an hour cleaning, and am now back to sitting around doing nothing on my laptop. And playing blackjack against myself. And eating cheese and beans on toast.

One of those weeks, I guess.