Slow Morning

It's one of those mornings. The past week has been busy, full of stress, unwanted tasks, and general blech. There's been good news and bad news, both of which are stressful. And I'm hung up on the fact I just used a form of the word 'stress' twice in a row, and my Inner Critic won't let it go. Watch me walk away from the now thrice-used word, waving farewell to my Inner Critic as she stands there, fists on hips, pouting and steaming from the ears, cartoonlike. Ha, I ignore you. I am too tired this morning, my mind too full of cobwebs to worry about a little thing like that.

Someone needs a hug.

Not that I should let my standards drop, I think, as the Critic pounces on that phrase (which I erased once before remembering I'm defiant this morning), crying, "Yeah, like your 'standards' are worth upholding, you hack!' Now that I've started writing something, the Critic has decided she's been neglecting me these past few weeks and is lighting into me something fierce.

That's okay. As I said, I have too much brain fog to really register a lot of the Critic's abuse just at the moment. I'm thinking of the cat on my wallpaper, of the phone calls (ugh) I have to make today, of the fact I've not gotten started on any articles like I've been planning to do for a long time.

Okay, now that's a downward spiral. I suppose I should end this ramble right here, in the hope that it's not a complete waste of time/bandwidth/pixels and that someone gets something out of it, even if that something is that I am a very odd duck.

A Cup of Tea, A Cookie, and An Annoying Article (Dec 30, 2009)

(The manual importing continues.  Remember when it was cold outside?  Do ya?)

Well, here we are again. It's absolutely frigid outside, but I have a cup of tea and some chocolate-covered graham cracker cookies, so things could definitely be worse. And I'm inside, rather than outside. That's a plus.

A cup of tea-hee, a cookie,
and you-hoo!

Things have been a little rough the last couple of days. I have a couple of articles I've been trying to shape up for Associated Content, but each time I look them over, they try to morph into something else. I changed a title yesterday and suddenly the focus of the entire article changed. I may have to rewrite that one.

My goal is to publish one article/item a week, and I've fallen behind in that. I don't participate in a lot of holiday activities, so I can't even really use the holiday as an excuse. But I seem to be fairly stuck, at least on the articles I've been working on lately. First it was a general information/advice piece. Then I started to get more detailled. Then I changed the title and suddenly it's a 'How To Do That Thing You Might Want To Do But Could Use Some More Advice On' kind of thing, which would require a rewrite for the change of focus. Le sigh.

I was considering publishing a couple of my old poems for pageviews. Over the years I've written poetry from time to time and even had one published in my college's literary magazine. They're mostly pretty frivolous, my poems, and very visceral. Over the years, I've considered myself the kind of person who doesn't write poetry; the poems happen to me. But I've managed to write three poems on demand for Associated Content so far. Perhaps in actually sitting down to consciously write a poem about a particular subject, I've discovered what I did during NaNoWriMo: that I *can* do it if I put my mind to it. An empowering discovery, that.

When my creativity fails me, I switch my focus to something else. Having been slightly cranky the last few days, due in no small part to my writing schedule's collapse and the struggle I'm having with my articles, I shifted gears and tidied up a bit yesterday. Emptied overflowing wastepaper baskets, put away laundry that's been languishing for a week, swept the kitchen floor. Is that a tumblefur or a tribble under the baseboard?

I also do some freelance data entry work for a local company, and, having just received more paperwork from them that needs tallying, I plan to hit that this morning and/or afternoon. And maybe I'll finally work out how to get my wireless network card up and running in Ubuntu today. Well, okay, that's a bit ambitious, I expect. But there are plenty of things for me to do that aren't staring at the same bloody article that keeps morphing into new articles under my exasperated gaze.

The day is young and I have tea. I think that tea is looking a little low... I'll go set up a fresh cup and see what falls out of my brain today.