Too interesting

I’ve been trying to diagnose my current writing woes. While, yes, there has been an insane amount of admin, travel, and the site disasters of the last two days1 have not been helpful, but they’re not the cause, they’re just hindrances.

This is my current theory:

The world I’m living in right now is much more interesting than any world I could write.

I can’t look away from the election. From the world financial crisis. From all the crazy stuff that’s going on.

Is anyone else having the same problem?

  1. Plus now having to look for a new webhost []

15 comments

  1. toxicfur on #

    Yes. I write technical stuff for my job. Technical stuff with hard deadlines that I can’t move because I don’t feel like writing. Even so, I’m having a really, really hard time doing anything besides reloading fivethirtyeight.com and reading and listening to the news.

  2. marrije on #

    oh yes. this american election thing is very much killing my productivity, and i only want to listen to npr’s planet money podcast, because they do such a great job of teaching me all sorts of new things, like what are credit default swaps & such. fascinating. in its scariness.

    god, i hope obama wins.

  3. Gwenda on #

    Sort of — although I think crashing to finish this book by election day (which is my deadline from Martine) is the only thing keeping me relatively sane. Otherwise, I’d just reload Talking Points Memo ever five seconds. I try to use the political sites as a reward for getting stuff done. Plus, I know if it doesn’t go the way I want, I will be sooooo depressed afterward, I figure I have to get done beforehand.

  4. Robyn on #

    Productivity? What productivity? Never had any. I write technical stuff for my job, too, and… well, I’m just cutting and pasting stuff out of emails at this point, raplacing “the user” with “you”. Today, I blame Halloween spirit (sugar rush).

  5. Justine on #

    Tis most excellent not to be alone. Not that I’m looking at any of those sites or Daily Kos or anything. I’m working I am. Yes, working . . .

  6. Emily on #

    Its boring!

  7. Brent on #

    Actually, my current world is a little too depressing. I much prefer the worlds I write in. Little things like the good guys winning most of the time perhaps?

  8. Hillary! on #

    Very depressing for me too. I need $175 to pay for rent and car insurance. I am freakning out a little. Maybe this will teach me how to manage my money. I don’t like being an adult.

  9. PixelFish on #

    Um…..barring my arguments on Scalzi’s site (I’m on the pro-gay-marriage side) I think my politics crunching has been limited to making sure I can vote at all. (We just moved to Seattle. My boyfriend’s registration appears to have gotten lost, so he has to cast a provisional ballot, while my registration had an error on it that got corrected today. Whew!)

    Otherwise, I’ve been ignoring most of the politics (except for pictures of Barack O’Lanterns) and playing lots of World of Warcraft.

  10. Jack Heath on #

    This whole “end of the world” thing has yet to reach the point where I’m forced to stop ignoring it – my powers of ignore-ance are astounding. So writing proceeds unhindered.

    There is a vague sense of unease in the back of my mind, though – how long until people stop buying books out of poverty?

  11. Jack Heath on #

    P.S. My web host is pretty good, if you’re still looking for one. They’re called Atom8 Solutions.

  12. Doselle on #

    Yes. It is awful. Truly awful. I feel as if my imagination is holding its breath to keep from anticipating a multitude of horrors just over the horizon. It started for me after Palin’s speech at the RNC, dovetailed into a deep depression and finally went into a kind of weird auto-pilot.

    I was actually considering therapy and/or medication until I realized it was just the effing election.

  13. Corey J Feldman on #

    It was definitely harder to devote time to writing heading into the election. You were not alone, even stepping outside your chosen profession. I can’t even imagine the millions of dollars in lost work productivity over the last few weeks.

Comments are closed.