- Work on a freelance writing assignment
- Finish several projects at work
- Do laundry
- Fold the laundry
- Call my mother
- Feed Leapy
- Sleep
- Finish dishes
- Get ready for Banana to return
- Coax the dog into taking a walk on a rainy evening
- Wrap up some home administrative duties
- Find storage for 63 boxes of t-shirts tomorrow morning
- Breathe
- Work on a freelance writing assignment
Full circle. I do have to do all of those things, and more. Each one is critical in its own way, but the freelance gig is the one that's causing the most stress right now. And it's the one I'm having the hardest time tackling.
It's not a difficult job--copy for a fairly simple website. The copy is somewhat technical, but that doesn't seem to be the problem. I grasp the subject matter; I even know more or less where I want to take the copy. I just can't start. It's like there's a wall between my brain and the words when I sit down to tackle it. It's been going on for more than a week now, and I'm at the point where I can't even think about it because it has become it's own self-perpetuating irritant.
So what do I do? Sit here, listen to music, drink a beer, write the 200th post in this blog. I can keep most of it under the guise of chilling out from a very, very intense period at work and lots of running around in the last few weeks. But that also seems like a red herring. The real problem–I think—is that I just don't want to do it right now. And yet I have to. We're back to the paradox of procrastinating by pondering procrastination.
What also seems tied to this in some ways is a general inability to write lately. Though I can tackle this blog–in fits and starts, albeit–I cannot seem to generate any new professional copy, and certainly not anything that is good. There have been two recent struggles at work, and both times I had to ask someone else to start the writing for me, and in both cases, the end result was still weak.
What's odd is that this is the first time I've run into this problem since I stopped writing creatively two and a half years ago. Oversaturation, maybe?
