organized chaos

My brain is a mass of things I want to do, things I need to do and things I must do to survive. Writing is on all of those lists. The good thing, I have a job that allows me enough free time that I can write if I'm not too distracted. The bad thing is, I am almost always distracted, tired or too frazzled too get anything done. And the ideas never stop coming.

I've revamped my personal To Do list several times over the past few weeks. It keeps getting longer. Good, because it means I haven't lost my ambition no matter how frustrated I get with my progress. But it sometimes makes me feel...overwhelmed? Yes, overwhelmed with all of the things I have planned for myself. I want to be one of those writers with a huge back catalog of books and shorts stories, a web coming, an ongoing web serial, five blogs, a dynamic website and a facebook page that gets updated several times a week. Basically, I want to be the me several years from now. I'm doing it in baby steps now and that's not always enough for me. I know the pressure to produce is about 75% internal and I'm trying to ease that and not focus on the 25% that makes me feel inadequate with what I do produce.

Today is the first step towards that. I am going to cut off my internet (I can hear the voices in my head screaming already) and try to do nothing but write for four hours. I haven't done that since...I can't even say when. It's been years. Too long. Long enough that I'm sure my muse is hiding in the back of her closet somewhere, nervous about me coming over and staring her down because she hasn't seen much of me lately. We don't have a confrontational relationship because I'm always afraid of scaring her off. After that incident where she didn't speak to me for seven months, I decided that fear was better than forcing her to work. She works for me, not the other way around! So, today she'll have to gather her minions and finish telling me the story we started in June. I want this sequel done. Yesterday. I will not take no for an answer.