Writing For Joy

When I get stressed I am easily distracted. For instance: when I was working on the revisions for Boundless, I had to actively work to not play The Hunger Games, which is one of those facebook games where you spend about three minutes at a time on before you run out of "energy." Is it a good game? Um, no. Not really. There's nothing challenging or cool about it. But I still felt my mind returning, over and over, to the desire to play. Ooh, I would think. Maybe I have enough energy to pick all the roses in President Snow's garden. . . And off I would go.

Not productive.

I also had to work to stay off Twitter and facebook in general and refuse to give in to the urge to check my email every few minutes.

Why? I kept asking myself. You have work to do! Get to it!

But it was hard work. Intense work. My brain was metaphorically sweating, for hours at a time. And all it wanted was a little breather to do something mindless for say, three minutes.

What's funny to me is that pretty much the minute I pressed send and sent the new-and-improved Boundless draft to my editor, I lost the desire to play the game. Or hang out on Twitter and facebook. It took about a week of resting, getting adequate sleep, weaning myself off the caffeine I used via iced tea to get myself through the deadline, cleaning my house so that my mind felt uncluttered, but at the end of all of that, I felt like myself again.

Whew.

And then I wanted to write. Not for work. Not for pay (although pay is good. I like pay.) but for the sheer joy of writing. For the fun of finding characters and watching them go do their unexpected things. For the beauty of language. For the play of ideas.

It is soooooo good to write out of joy again.

Right now I am working on:

• a novella. Details on that to come.
• a short story for a very awesome anthology that I was thrilled to be asked to be a part of
• a new novel
• and still stewing over the final changes I need to make to Boundless. Cuz we're not done yet, folks.

So yeah, I'm busy. Again. Still. Whatever. But it feels so good to write!