I haven’t quite decided whether writing this blog constitutes killing time or using it. If I write an average of 350 words for each entry then the total tonnage of my trite twaddle will touch 128,000 words. There are shorter fantasy epics.
So, is this dedication a good use of time? Maybe. Because frankly no matter how disciplined I was I wouldn’t write 350 words a day of a novel, because I’d constantly agonise about whether the plot was going where I wanted to and if the lead character was engaging and whether I had conjured a poetic enough description for the canal-side where they find the mutilated corpse of Piers Morgan.
Procrastination may be the Thief of Time, but we do have a habit of leaving the door open and leaving our valuables lying about. Whether its body and brain chemistry or just plain laziness, I just can’t sit down and do the things I ought to be doing. There’s all these wonderful minutes available, but it takes so long to get myself into the right ftrame of mind that I barely have any time left over. Forget the smug assertions of the writer (Peter De Vries, apparently) who said:
“I write when I'm inspired, and I see to it that I'm inspired at nine o'clock every morning”.
Bully for him (though I notice that whatever he was producing at 9 o’clock in the morning hasn’t exactly burned itself on popular consciousness). But Life ain’t that simple. Imagine a world where there were no distractions – no TV, no games, no facebook or twitter, no sport, no dartboard with Thatcher’s face stuck to it, no genetically-engineered performing frog that can juggle potatoes with its feet while whistling “Wake Me Up Before You Go Go”. In this wonderful world of ascetic focus would you free your time and entertain yourself by scouring the inner limits of your imagination and unleashing a menagerie of fantastic creations upon an unsuspecting world?
Well, I wouldn’t. Because I’d be too fucking bored to create anything. And that’s the cruel twist in my creativity. I do it because I am engaged and excited about things – it doesn’t make me excited about things.
This is why some of these entries are frankly shit. Sorry about that.
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