Welcome to Writer Rants–where every Friday a writer just lets loose on whatever the heck is bugging them this week. Enjoy.
Things are not looking good for our heroine. Though she has prevailed through farming in a polar vortex, building a writer’s website without technical knowledge and writing while traveling without regular internet, the greatest threat to her writing career is knocking. She laments to her fellow blog writers there’s another snow day, it may be the end.
Maybe that sounds a bit extreme, but when you’re writing, every distraction seems like it’s a planned assault on your productivity! Even though we love our families, when you’re working from home, there’s a certain disconnect about whether you’re WORKING or just sitting at the computer. Even if you tell your family that you’re working, that work just isn’t respected as much as if you were sitting in an office!
Part of this reason is social conditioning that we all receive as children. By nature, we want to be in or near a group, and if something has someone’s attention, you want to know what it is, hence rubbernecking at accidents and the 3-year-old hanging off you and talking to you while you’re on the phone, because they want in on the action, too!
I recently did a search-and-rescue exercise at a class. Every time somebody found a “victim” and called out, almost the entire team would drop the area they were searching to come see what the excitement was about and if they could offer suggestions or advice on how the “victim” was treated on our log books. This meant that by the end of the exercise, my team hadn’t finished searching the entire area, leaving “victims” in need of rescue.
This last winter was particularly gruesome on our farm. With the polar vortex going full bore, we had a very hard winter on our farm. The plumbing froze and broke on a number of occasions, the wood stove needed feeding every two to three hours all day and night, livestock water troughs needed to be broken open for the sheep, my disabled husband needed more help with things and our daughter had over four weeks of snow days.
Needless to say, my sleep schedule, plans for healthy eating, sanity and writing schedule went completely down the tubes in the process.
We’ve just begun to enjoy spring in southwest Missouri, with daffodils, grape hyacinth and lilac blooming. Supposedly we were past the last freeze a few weeks ago, just to have to fire up the woodstove again a couple nights ago after bringing in plants to protect them. There were even a few white flakes of that four-letter-word coming down. So help me, if the school calls another snow day, I’m taking hostages.
Cathleen V is a multi-talented writer with experience in various fields. She focuses on content, article and blog writing for small business management, content optimization and marketing, arts businesses, crafts, agriculture, home improvement, food, nutrition and natural health. She is a top 1% content writer out of over 22,000.
