Strangely Socialised

Things what I learned this weekend:

• Walking for two hours in a snowstorm is beautiful, but leaves you with sore thighs.
• People who aren’t living in an apartment with minimal heat are not motivated to fix it.
• Cookie dough dries out in the fridge. Lesson learned: eat it more quickly.
• Toronto is beautiful.
• Trust your family, even when you have doubts. They can surprise you sometimes, and it’s wonderful.
• People drink more coffee when it’s cold. Arrive early if you want a seat.
• I have not gone running in far too long. I have no one but myself to blame for this.
• I need a new messenger bag, one that is not held together by willpower and safety pins. The three bleeding points on my left hand attest to this.
• I need to read the books I own before buying more.

Word count for the day: at least two thousand, probably more. I didn’t thinking to check where I started, and there was so much editing work involved today I’m not sure how much was from new scenes and how much was just tightening here and fleshing out there. It feels good, though, even though I’ve probably had enough lattes in the past two days to power an entire midnight shift.

There’s something about this time of year that really wakes me up again. I forget, in the depths of winter (even now that I’m in a substantially warmer climate) how much of my lethargy has to do with the time of year. I forget until spring comes again and suddenly I have trouble sitting still. If it were up to me I’d do away with winter and summer entirely, and my life would be an endless string of spring and fall.

There are some days when I feel like what I really need to do is make a list of Practical Advice for Living. On this list would be such things as ‘buy toilet paper before you run out’, ‘wear a warmer jacket when it’s cold’ and ‘don’t watch Supernatural before bed’. I’ve managed to violate all three of these in the past week or so, most memorably (re-)watching two episodes of Supernatural last night before going to bed and having the unsettling dreams to show for it.

Yesterday was a complete wash on the writing front, but at least I entertained the clientele of Urbana with an animated phone call. (I exaggerate; I promise I didn’t make a spectacle of myself. But I did do what I normally don’t and took a – very urgent – call.) Today, however, was productive, despite the fact that Second Cup is no longer serving Belgian chocolate orange lattes. (I cannot express the sheer bliss of these lattes; maybe they’ll still make them special.) At least five hundred words on two stories, plus a bit of administrative work I needed to get done. And, more importantly, I managed to finally rewrite the beginning of a story I’ve long been picking at in a way that I think sets the right tone for what’s to come. Sometimes writing two paragraphs of really good stuff is more productive than two pages of work that you’re less than enthused about.

So I’ve made my bed, organised my files, done some RPG administrivia, caught up on Supernatural, caught up on Torchwood, reorganised my website and changed my desktop background. I have not written one single word since Friday afternoon. One might think that being snowed in would increase productivity. One would be wrong. And if I wanted to continue my streak, I have a couple of thousand books that need organising, but perhaps getting myself into some pants and out of the apartment would do wonders for my frame of mind. If nothing else, it’ll get me a latte and some snapshots of the latest dumping of snow on Toronto this year.

I keep meaning to do a roundup of all the things I’ve been reading, but apparently there wasn’t time to fit that in between alphabetising my DVDs and swiffering the library.

Writing time today was a bit of a failure, to be perfectly honest. The ingredients were all there: the unfinished story, the laptop, the coffee, the music… but it all amounted to a lot of staring out the window and a rejigging of the contents of my iPod. I wrote one completely sentence, but I deleted three, so I’m not sure whether that counts as forward progress or not.

Currently reading: Christopher Priest – The Prestige

I started out the year thinking that I was tired of the local Starbucks and Second Cups (after they renovated and thus destroyed my favourite Second Cup) and that this year I would go on the quest for the perfect coffeeshop. Not the perfect coffee, but the perfect coffeeshop. The one which was close to home, where I could go and spend a couple of hours writing and feel perfectly comfortable and productive.

It was a short quest. I found Urbana on my first try.

I like to think that my belief that there was a perfect coffeeshop (and much like finding The One, I don’t actually believe there’s just one coffeeshop that fit all my criteria, though probably no more than one within a two-block radius) wasn’t just another way to procrastinate. There are all kinds of ways to procrastinate without even knowing it, and sometimes I feel like I’ve tried all of them. After all, it’s that time of day again, when I have a couple of hours before I really need to work, when I have to decide whether I’m going to go and get dressed and head out early to go write or whether I’m going to stay here right in this sunbeam and kill time until I actually have to leave. Right now, the sunbeam is winning.

Sometimes I wonder why something I love is sometimes so hard. I have more works in progress than you can shake a stick at (this is a lie; I expect the average person and/or dog could shake a stick at them all in about fifteen seconds), but maybe that’s the problem. I spend as much time figuring out what I want to work on as I do actually writing. Frankly, sometimes more. I can’t imagine a life in which I was not writing, but sometimes not writing seems to be as much a part of the actual process of writing as writing itself.