When life gets in the way

Just a quick post before I go to bed.  Things are coming along well with the revision of Mercenary Savior–I fully expect to be finished by next week (hopefully by Tuesday).

That said, these past couple of days have been very unproductive, and it’s been very frustrating.  I feel as if tons of little things have been getting in the way.

Work is from 3:00 to 6:00, which can be nice but breaks the day in half, and donating plasma always seems to suck up a ton of time.  Besides that, I’ve been applying for work, and THAT certainly takes up quite a bit of  time mental space.

The main problem, though, is the urge to procrastinate.  These little things wouldn’t pop up all the time if I 1) were unusually excited about this book, or 2) had the iron discipline to buckle down and just do it.   I’m working on both of those, but in the meantime, it’s frustrating.

Still, I am producing.  I wrote about 1.5k words yesterday, and 2.3k today.  Nowhere near the 4k+/day I was hoping to write, but not bad.  Things are progressing.

Part of it may be the fact that my only computer right now is a netbook.  Netbooks are nice for traveling (I carry mine literally everywhere), but they aren’t great as primary machines.  Also, they tend to break down faster than regular laptops.  Mine’s probably got another year left, but the wear and tear is starting to show.

To remedy that, I’m thinking very seriously of building my own computer.  Tomorrow, BYU is having a surplus sale, and I’m hoping to pick out a decent LCD monitor or two, plus a keyboard and mouse.  I’ve picked out all the other parts online (I’ll blog about that later), but I’ll probably hold off until the  end of the month to buy them all.  I want to prove to myself that I can make more money in a month than I spend.

I know that a new computer won’t solve my writing problems, but it will be really cool, and it is something that I need–if not this very second, then at least before my netbook breaks down.  Plus, I’m hoping to learn a lot from the experience of building it from parts.

Other than that, things are good.  I will definitely finish Mercenary Savior by next week before CONduit, and the revision is significantly better than the old draft.  Before long, inshallah, I’ll have another  manuscript to float around with editors/agents.