While You're Making Other Plans

At the moment I have a few writing projects going. I’m writing this blog every day, a flash Horror story for Vamplit Publishing every week, I have a short story I’m calling “Mutes” that almost has a 1st draft done but I’ll need to put it through at least two more drafts before the end of the month when I need to submit it to an anthology, and I’m still working on that little novel, Home Grown, that’s getting pretty close to done in first draft form as well. There’s another anthology I’d like to have a submission ready for by the end of the month as well.

I guess you could say I’m a little busy.

So this morning I went through my 1st edit on this week’s Friday Flash, and it was still pretty early. I decided to go to work early and work on Mutes there, rather than try to work on it at home for a while and then go to work. His way I could wind up with as much as 45 minutes to work on it and I’d already be at work, and on time. Sounded like a plan to me!

So I broke everything down, packed my work bag and hit the “sleep” button on my laptop so I could get into the office and get right to work, no tedious waiting for the laptop to boot up. I zipped right in to work (at that time of morning there is no traffic at all, but a half-hour later there always seems to be a problem). I marched right into the break room with exactly 45 minutes until I had to punch in for the day, whipped out the laptop, opened it, and stared.

For some reason, it had decided, all on its own, to shut down completely rather than just going into ‘sleep’ mode. I looked at the clock, knowing that when I haven’t restarted my laptop for a while (and I had not) it takes some time to boot up. Especially when the registry cleaner takes over (as I knew it was going to), cleans the registry and auto-restarts. When it does all that, and I knew it was going to, it takes about 15 minutes for the damn machine to settle down with me. That would lose me 20 minutes of writing time.

For those of you paying attention, I said the computer would take 15 minutes to boot, but I lost 20 minutes of writing time. You have to factor in that I spent just over 5 minutes cursing loudly before I even attempted to bring the laptop back up to serviceability.

And then of course, while I was waiting, one of my coworkers came in for her break and talked to me for a bit. She told me about a funny dream she had, and I had to admit that it was pretty funny. The problem was the talking we did about the dream afterward. It gave me what I think is a terrific short story idea, possibly a flash (very short story). I have to try to write this so I can show her what she did while she still recalls the original conversation.

Thus, not only did I not get as much work done this morning as I had anticipated, I actually clocked in with more writing work to do that I had started out with!

You see the title of this blog? About how “Life is what happens while you’re making other plans?” This morning was a terrific example of that!

Huzzah!

Talk to you later!