Holy Crap! This Here's Post 99!
Yep. 99 League of Reluctant Adults blog posts. It seems like just yesterday when Jill emailed with the scheme she and Ilona cooked up. And now we're rolling along, gathering no moss, throwing no ston...well yes throwing stones but, well, you know what I mean.
It seems the perfect time, then. While I'm knee deep in deadlines and struggling with an unweildy manuscript, to drop everything and shit out a top ten list for you hambones. So that's what I'll do.
...and it's titled:
10. Good Books: Damn you writers! How do you expect me to finish my novel when I've got so much reading to do. It's just not possible. Among the culprits this past year were Ilona's MAGIC BITES, Jeaniene Frost's HALFWAY TO THE GRAVE, Joe Schreiber's EAT THE DARK and his unpublished manuscript THE BLACK WING, which is going to rival Straub for creepy secrets/ghosts, and SNAKE AGENT by Liz Williams, which I can't mention enough.
9. New Story Ideas: There's nothing worse than sitting down to a writing session and dwelling on a new "what if." My most recent is a dirty little victorian horror I call CLUCK. Ended up writing the bones of it for a few hours instead of a new chapter. Someone's thrown a gris-gris under my house.
8. Eating Disorders: I have an unhealthy fascination with reality shows about eating disorders. Thank you INTERVENTION and BROOKHAVEN OBESITY CLINIC, you're ruining my life. In fact, there was this one...nope. Not going to even finish the sentence. I'm already getting the urge to head downstairs and check the channel guide.
7. You Tube Videos: I'm not talking about those jokey vids that people post of their kids falling or prisoner's dirty dancing, I'm talking music videos. 5 minutes a pop. Watch 10 and you've lost a valuable hour of writing time.
6. Puppy Pee: While this is the unquestionably the cutest baby ever...
This...
...is not!
5. Self Googling: I know, I know. It's one of those things that's sure to drive me mad. What are people saying? Are people talking at all? Do I exist? I wonder if this particular ailment strikes all authors.
4. Facebook Scrabulous: Enough said.
3. Frequent Amazon Ranking Checks: Now I know I'm not alone here. Those rankings may be arbitrarily generated numbers, as I've been told by an Amazon employee. But I'm hooked, I measure the emotional quality of my day by my standings. Then I compare. Boy do I compare. First is Anton, who usually is pretty close in ranking, and I know does the same with mine--cuz we're sick, that way--then come all the others. I could spend hours. Hours I tell you. In case you're wondering: 93,626. Not the best but I'm happy under 100,000 for some reason. And that reason is...INSANITY!
2. Errands: Nothing eats up more of my time than running errands. We live in a new community that is twenty minutes in any direction from a grocery store. For a planned community of several thousand people, this seems woefully underplanned. But, I'm the one that's home so I can't really expect Caroline to do the grocery shopping. Well I could, but then I'd be an asshole and I'm much more comfortable with the term crazy.
And, now...drum roll...
1. Blogging: Take this one for instance, it's 11:00 am. I've been up since 7:30. I had to figure out what the top ten was going to be about (despite coming up with the topic last week, I hadn't done any more thinking on it than that), make a list, order them. Mosy on through the internet to look for pictures and then take a few myself and upload them (oh yeah, that's fresh pee). Three and a half hours. Am I on crack?
So there they are, my top ten distractions. If there's one thing that can be said about me, it's that I'm distractible. In fact what's that clicking sound?
Seems to be coming from the...
It seems the perfect time, then. While I'm knee deep in deadlines and struggling with an unweildy manuscript, to drop everything and shit out a top ten list for you hambones. So that's what I'll do.
...and it's titled:
TOP TEN DISTRACTIONS
(THAT KEEP MARK IN A STATE OF DEADLINE DRIVEN PANIC,
BORDERING ON HIS FIRST SCHIZOPHRENIC BREAK!)
(THAT KEEP MARK IN A STATE OF DEADLINE DRIVEN PANIC,
BORDERING ON HIS FIRST SCHIZOPHRENIC BREAK!)
10. Good Books: Damn you writers! How do you expect me to finish my novel when I've got so much reading to do. It's just not possible. Among the culprits this past year were Ilona's MAGIC BITES, Jeaniene Frost's HALFWAY TO THE GRAVE, Joe Schreiber's EAT THE DARK and his unpublished manuscript THE BLACK WING, which is going to rival Straub for creepy secrets/ghosts, and SNAKE AGENT by Liz Williams, which I can't mention enough.9. New Story Ideas: There's nothing worse than sitting down to a writing session and dwelling on a new "what if." My most recent is a dirty little victorian horror I call CLUCK. Ended up writing the bones of it for a few hours instead of a new chapter. Someone's thrown a gris-gris under my house.
8. Eating Disorders: I have an unhealthy fascination with reality shows about eating disorders. Thank you INTERVENTION and BROOKHAVEN OBESITY CLINIC, you're ruining my life. In fact, there was this one...nope. Not going to even finish the sentence. I'm already getting the urge to head downstairs and check the channel guide.7. You Tube Videos: I'm not talking about those jokey vids that people post of their kids falling or prisoner's dirty dancing, I'm talking music videos. 5 minutes a pop. Watch 10 and you've lost a valuable hour of writing time.
6. Puppy Pee: While this is the unquestionably the cutest baby ever...
This...
...is not!5. Self Googling: I know, I know. It's one of those things that's sure to drive me mad. What are people saying? Are people talking at all? Do I exist? I wonder if this particular ailment strikes all authors.
4. Facebook Scrabulous: Enough said.
3. Frequent Amazon Ranking Checks: Now I know I'm not alone here. Those rankings may be arbitrarily generated numbers, as I've been told by an Amazon employee. But I'm hooked, I measure the emotional quality of my day by my standings. Then I compare. Boy do I compare. First is Anton, who usually is pretty close in ranking, and I know does the same with mine--cuz we're sick, that way--then come all the others. I could spend hours. Hours I tell you. In case you're wondering: 93,626. Not the best but I'm happy under 100,000 for some reason. And that reason is...INSANITY!
2. Errands: Nothing eats up more of my time than running errands. We live in a new community that is twenty minutes in any direction from a grocery store. For a planned community of several thousand people, this seems woefully underplanned. But, I'm the one that's home so I can't really expect Caroline to do the grocery shopping. Well I could, but then I'd be an asshole and I'm much more comfortable with the term crazy.
And, now...drum roll...
1. Blogging: Take this one for instance, it's 11:00 am. I've been up since 7:30. I had to figure out what the top ten was going to be about (despite coming up with the topic last week, I hadn't done any more thinking on it than that), make a list, order them. Mosy on through the internet to look for pictures and then take a few myself and upload them (oh yeah, that's fresh pee). Three and a half hours. Am I on crack?
So there they are, my top ten distractions. If there's one thing that can be said about me, it's that I'm distractible. In fact what's that clicking sound?
Seems to be coming from the...
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