Goals Down the Toilet and Other Depressing Complaints with No Relevance in the REAL World.

I had a plan. I really did. It was a good plan, solid, with a schedual and dates and times. Good plan.

It was my summer plan.

The first half was dominated by visiting a dear friend for her birthday and taking on a job as co-RA in charge of an army of teenage girls (talk about gathering dramatic material). This was in the plan. Check. Fin. Done deal.

The rest of the plan. . . Well, suffice to say, it did not work out. As planned. It was simple really. I would reach a certain writing goal, a certain art goal. I would read a certain number of books, clean the house, exercise, diet, train my little brother to be a half-way decent essay writer, plan out my future. . . You know, the usual. However, these plans came to a screeching hault after about a weeks time. I have read only a handful of books. The house is a disaster zone. I have been walking every day but my diet is somewhat lacking and has not resulted in anything significant. My brother has far more interest in video games. And my future. . . It's in the future.

So I had a new plan involving the last two weeks before dorm move-in. I was going to attempt twenty-thousand words. But, before this journey began, I was going to tack the tail end onto a few of my short stories.

The every evening that this was to begin my mother became very ill and had to be rushed to a doctor. Kidney stones. Again. This is still not resolved but the infection is being dealt with and she hasn't felt that sort of pain again. The next day nature decided to add to this by giving me a tooth infection. Thank you very much, Mr. Wisdom Tooth, for the ringing ears and locked jaw. Mr. Wisdom Tooth waves at the bright new world from a somewhat sideways position and should probably be extracted, but, alas, lack of money and insurance. A few antibiotics cleared up the infection, thankfully, and I can now open my mouth again and chew "big-people" food. And now, you ask? Now writers' block. Simple.

Fine, Nature, fine. But I will not give up my planning. So there!

Here goes the planning again. To hell with the 20,000. I'm going to finish those two pieces and clean my bedroom. I'm going to get through the three books I'm in the middle of. It's getting done. And my dorm things are getting repacked.

As soon as I finish procrastinating.

A Blog is a Blog is a. . .What's a Blog?

There are certain degrees of procrastination. There are also certain types of procrastinators. Some might believe that a "busy" procrastinator is one with a social life and no need to finish important deeds such as schoolwork. Not true. Busy Procrastinators are in a state of constant movement, procrastinating from one project to another. Eventually, they circle back to their first subjects of procrastination and complete them because the other tasks become anxiety-riddled messes.

Thus was born the blog.

See, the blog is essentially procrastination in a bottle. However, note the cycle of the busy procrastinator: B-Pro sighs at the oncoming research paper due in the next week. Her nature forces her to put it off to do more "research" on the paper subject. "Research" turns out to be as horrid as the paper. So she decides to be productive and write on her baby, her fiction. Well, we know where this leads. . .She decides to clean the house. "Oh, dear! Look at that mold!" She decides that she'll write a blog--"I've always wanted to write one, after all. . . " She sets up an account, and by then, the anxiety is back at critical. The nervousness she feels when setting up a blog pushes her back to the paper that's due in two days. She finishes the cycle. A task has been completed only because she procrastinated during all of her forms of procrastination. She's quite a busy procrastinator. An efficient procrastinator in her own way.

Thus was born this blog.

My account was set up about a year ago, and, from the lack of previous posts, I'm sure you get the moral of the story. But, eventually, I came back to begin anew. That's the fun part of putting something off. When you come back, you don't remember why you did what you did in the first place. It's almost like being reborn.

Fun stuff.

What does this have to do with my blog?

My fiction follows this cycle as well. Eventually, I come back to what I started. After all, a project's never really closed, is it? It's just waiting for its turn. Sometimes the hardest thing a writer can do is to deny it that turn, to write the dreaded HOLD across scribbled pages of notes. When a Busy Procrastinator is forced to make decisions to delete old works, she panics. Then she rants. Hence the purpose of this madness, the purpose of the blog.

Rant, complain. Work through the anxiety of saying goodbye and saying hello. Welcome to The Busy Procrastinator.