Earl explained it to me: we plan ahead, that way we don’t do anything right now.

Oh, Valentine (from Tremors), how I relate to you. Unfortunately, not all of us can pole vault through the desert using homemade cannon-fuse bombs to eradicate gigantic underground monsters. Some of us have to write.

But when I am "planning ahead" there are numerous other things I can be found doing:

-Watching The Best of the Joy of Painting. Because it is amazing how Bob Ross can turn a black spot into a three-dimensional rock by poking a brush at it. And how he just drops in happy trees that live right back there. And how he makes instant water by dragging paint specks down. I think Bob Ross might have been a demon.

-Watching my cat steal a spare rib off of my plate and drag it off like a lion retreating into the brush with a freshly killed zebra. Naughty cat.

-Watching the effing PRESIDENT sit across the desk from Jon Stewart. Obama can talk his way back into my head in the span of five minutes. But basically, politics these days makes me want to hold my breath and stomp my feet and pitch a hissy fit the likes of which the world has never seen.

-Playing Final Fantasy XIII, which I really enjoy despite mixed reviews and an admittedly hair-brained storyline.

Honestly, these are all things that I do, not to avoid writing, or even to procrastinate, but to balance it out. Forcing the issue is never a good idea, as I discovered this past week when I tried to cram 10,000 words into the space of a week. What am I, an idiot? It was bad, and ended up being re-written about eight times. I was all about deadlines and sweating the what-ifs and worrying about expectations and the performance of the first book that isn’t even out yet. And that doesn’t work. So I said Fuck it. I write what I want when I feel like it. And almost as soon as I did, it became fun again. And good to boot.

And the whine of the day: now that the Yankees are dead and ground into the dirt where they belong, I will no longer care about baseball until the Twins and Rays go back to training camp this spring. So can Fringe just come back now, please?

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