Meh. Gah! ARRRGH!!!

So I haven't written in over a week. I've got a whole long list of excuses. Some of them are valid (had to get my RWA chapter's newsletter finished and distributed). Some of them are understandable (Drewbie was fighting a fever and rivers of snot Monday and Tuesday, and couldn't make up his mind whether he wanted to crash on me or run around the house and tear it apart; hence I was a wee bit exhausted those two evenings). Some of them are of the standard lame procrastinating and issue avoidance stuff (on the upside, I did finish two excellent books).

To combat procrastination, I tried to schedule an off night each week that I could totally waste however I wished: farting around the internets, playing a video game, reading a book, channel surfing, whatever. Then I realized that procrastination wasn't my problem, it was the issue avoidance stuff. Truth be told, those books I finished were all about escaping my own thoughts for as long as I could be absorbed by those stories.

The issues I'm avoiding? Well, the first seems so simple that I know I can find a way to fix it. Drew is hitting a patch of Terrible Twos, and, unfortunately, I'm hitting a patch of extreme impatience and irritability. What makes the solution difficult here is that I'm fairly certain Drew's acting out would be resolved by having my undivided attention most of the time. Unfortunately, I have to work 25 hours every week, and he's up and active for all but eight of them. So he's always in my office, trying to get my attention, thus making it impossible for me to hold a thought, let alone keep a train of though on track while I'm trying to work. When he finally does something drastic to get my attention, I've already lost so much sanity trying to focus on my job that I react disproportionately to the trigger. I've got a couple of ideas here that I'll be mapping out tonight instead of writing. Essentially, I need to enter each day armed with alternate strategies and tactics for dealing with me before I deal with him.

That ties into the second issue I'm avoiding as well. I've been working from home for a year and a half now, and I've also seen a severe reduction in the amount of trips back to my company's office in the past eight months. This means that I am less connected with my colleagues. Plus the burden of working from home in a still new neighborhood in which I can't seem to find folks with whom I have more than an address and a child in common means I just don't interact with people as much as I used to, and I'm starting to feel sub-human. Add in that it seems society is more than happy to peg me as mother and homemaker before considering me (or treating me) as anything else, and I'm starting to feel very alone, sometimes even ignored. There are several solutions here as well, which I am investigating.

These aren't insurmountable problems, but when I'm constantly feeling like I can't maintain a thought or can't hold my temper or can't participate in society, well, I'd just rather that stuff go away, leave me 'lone, fix itself so I can get on with life. But the fixes are up to me, the attitude is mine alone to adjust. And I'm finally getting to the point where all the pieces are coming into place, so I'm sure I'll get back on the horse and actually maintain a consistent writing schedule that isn't prone to fits of escapism and moping--or at least said fits won't be as frequent. Then I can flex my time management skills and actually write the way I know I can. Well, that's the hope, at least. I'm determined to get a draft of THUMB done by the end of June. If a side effect of that is fixing a few more of my neurotic ticks, then swell.