Procrastination

I started to write this a week ago Saturday, then realized that since I wouldn't be posting it until Monday, I could finish it on Sunday...last Sunday, that is. And here we are at yet another Sunday, and the only reason I'm doing it today is because otherwise I would wake up Monday morning and have no blog at all.

I don't like procrastinating, but I end up doing it far more than I want to or should. With blogs, I always intend to build up a backlog of them...you know, sort of like stacking up wood for the fireplace. But on those very rare occasions when I get perhaps two blogs ahead, instead of replacing them as I use them...which would always keep me two ahead, I think "Oh, I don't really have to do a blog for tomorrow...I've got two waiting." And then it's "...I've got one waiting." And then it's "Dear Lord, it's 10 p.m. and I don't have a blog for tomorrow."

I currently have no fewer than thirty...count 'em, 30!...started-but-never-finished blogs. Were I to finish them, I wouldn't have to worry about writing another blog for ten weeks! But will I finish them? Well, sure, but it will take a long time...some of them are only a few sentences or paragraphs long, and I really have a lot of other things I've been putting off that I have to get to first.

I suppose I could find some small degree of pride in considering myself an equal opportunity procrastinator, but there are limits to my self-delusion. And frequently I find ways to combine doing things now with procrastination. I do laundry early every Friday morning, for example. I can easily overlook the fact that it is only because I've generally run out of things to wear by Thursday night. So I do the laundry. But rather than remake the bed immediately, I set the full basket of finished laundry on the bed, intending to fold everything, put it away, make the bed, etc. "shortly." But I really should check my email first. And suddenly it is 10:30 at night and the full laundry basket is still sitting on the bed. I have been known, I'm embarrassed to say, to simply throw the top sheet over the bed, and go to bed, just pulling the covers over me, sleeping on pillows without cases. But I always make the bed the next day. Really.

I have a tiny kitchen. Tiny as in "miniscule." Very few cabinets. For lack of room, I have only four large drinking glasses, trying to avoid running out of them...and thus be forced to wash dishes...by washing each out carefully for reuse. But somehow I put off washing the glass I most recently used and have to take out another clean one. Repeat sequence until I have absolutely no choice but to do dishes, even though I may still have a perfectly clean fork and two unused spoons in my silverware tray.

I'm very good about not putting off going to the doctor if I suspect something might conceivably be wrong with me. But some time ago the doctor suggested I see a urologist (I am, alas, at the "see a urologist" age). He didn't indicate that it was mandatory, but I determined to do it anyway. Did I? Not until I saw my regular doctor again last week for a general physical and he asked if I'd seen the urologist. When I said "no", he told me to do it. Oh, okay. Since he took it out of the "suggestion" phase and put it into the "do it" phase, I did it.

Writing books is a somewhat different animal, but sometimes not so much. I've promised my publisher back around September that I'd have The Peripheral Son, #14 in the Dick Hardesty Mystery series, in by February. But at that point, Caesar's Fall hadn't been released yet, and there was no real hurry. And here we are with the book only half written, and....

But I take refuge in the fact that it hasn't really, technically, been procrastination, but the necessities of constantly promoting the books I've already written, and maintaining a sometimes-several-times daily presence on Twitter and Facebook and various other web groups and sites I belong to, and keeping up on emails and...oh yes, in writing blogs on procrastination.

New entries are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back...and bring a friend. Your comments are always welcome. And you're invited to stop by my website at http://www.doriengrey.com, or drop me a note at doriengrey@gmail.com.

"Clank/Clunk/Clickety-Whirrr"

I stand in awe of people whose minds operate like a digital clock; who process linear thoughts smoothly and effortlessly. If their thought processes were made audible, they would produce a soft, unwavering "hummmmm." My own mind operates more like a 1898 John Deere Thresher held together with baling wire and duct tape, the almost deafening "clank/clunk/clickety-whirrr" of its operation making linear thought difficult if not impossible.

As happens so frequently when I get ready to write a blog, I actually did have a topic in mind: talking about the possibility of cutting back from three blogs a week to two. But before I could even start the first sentence...which, you'll notice from what I actually wrote above, has nothing whatever to do with blogs or the cutting back thereof...a million other thoughts began tumbling out of the Fibber McGee's closet of my mind. And the result, as always, was a sense of frustration over my lack of ability to concentrate on any one thought long enough to actually complete it.

But, with the computer screen blank beyond each word as it is typed, I really should try to fill what remains white with my original intent for this particular blog: talking about cutting back.

Clank!

When I first began these blogs, I was doing one every day. Even if I weren't trying to write books at the same time, the impracticality of this schedule soon became evident, and I reluctantly dropped back to three blogs a week. I'm not sure whether it's a matter of my having gotten even busier over time, or if I'm growing lazy, or if--the least likely of the three--I'm running out of things to say, but I am finding it harder to do three a week.

So why not just do it? I don't need anyone's permission.

Clunk!

Problem is, I feel an obligation to those kind enough to follow my ramblings. I am a sponge for the validation that knowing people actually read what I write gives me. Therefore, at bottom it, like everything else I do, is pretty much all about me and my unregenerate egocentrism.

Having written nearly 500 blogs, I've also considered, rather than keeping in touch with you even one day less frequently, writing two new blogs a week, and reposting one of the earlier blogs (which I already do, from time to time, when for some reason I just don't have a new one ready). But I will be having two e-book compilations of my blogs coming out later this year, and don't want to overdo the reposting.

Griiiiiiind!

Or perhaps I might just look on my blogs not as blogs, but as letters from me to you. Basically, that's what they are and always have been. I presumptively assume that if you read my blogs, there's something in them that you like, and in my simplistic thinking, that makes us friends in my mind, even though we may never have met in person.

Clickety-Whirrr!

Ah, the sound grows louder as more and more thoughts flood in, and the fields of thought stretch out in front of me to the horizon, waiting to be harvested.

New entries are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Please come back...and bring a friend. Your comments are always welcome. And you're invited to stop by my website at http://www.doriengrey.com, or drop me a note at doriengrey@gmail.com.