The Need for Focus

Thanks, everyone, for your kind words.  I appreciate them.  (The Landsquid does as well, though he’d never admit it.)

I think part of the problem is a lack of focus on my part.  This ties in a little with Friday’s entry, but I will leave that to Friday.  Anyway.  You know how it goes.  Story ideas pop up everywhere.  You have to know which ones to let go and which ones to leave for later, because if you work on everything that comes through your head you never get anything done.

Guess what I’ve been doing.

In retrospect, the lack of focus has been going on for some months now, probably since Nano, honestly.  Nano makes it easy to focus on a single goal.  WRITE 50K OR DIE TRYING (or not, but you get the point).

Every story idea that has come my way, I’ve nurtured, whether it’s a short story, a novel, a sequel, an anthology, a collab – and now I’m getting nothing done on anything, which is no doubt contributing to my feelings of uselessness.

What makes it worse is that I know it’s all an avoidance maneuver.  My big project, the one I should be on top of, is in a hard, scary part, and so I am working on other things to avoid it, and that must stop.

So.  Time to focus.  I’m instigating a Two Projects at a Time limit.   And I just happen to have two things that need to be done by the end of the month:

1.  Finish reworking my YA fantasy before the Writers’ Conference in a week and a half
2.  Finish the beta I’m working on

So.  FOCUS.  It must happen.

Any tips on how to avoid distraction?  Unfortunately, I know myself, and even if I manage to cut out other writing related projects, I’ll probably play flash games on the internet or something along those lines.