The Problem with Writing is

I have too many projects going at once. It starts off innocently enough, filling my time with productive activities rather than sitting around playing too many video games. Last November, I jumped into National Novel Writing Month, beginning on day two of the challenge. 50,000 words in thirty days? Oh yeah, I thought to myself, I can totally do that. I made it to 22,000 by November 30th and haven't made much progress since. I haven't forgotten about it, in fact, I think about it daily. However, I think I have only written about a paragraph since the end of the challenge. I guess I need structure to keep me motivated.

The goal of 1700 words a day kept me writing, but it was difficult to achieve, hence not even reaching half of 50,000 words. Sometime in December I found the amazing website 750words.com, where it tracks your writing and gauges your mood based on the words written. It puts it all into these neat pie charts and graphs, which I am not sure why I like so much, and gives you badges for writing continuously. I haven't made it past the penguin badge, which you get after writing for five days in a row. Ok, so maybe I just have a short attention span. The website should be enough structure to keep me motivated. Should.

I started this blog to get me used to someone else reading my writing, even if it is mostly my closest friends and family, or whatever anonymous stranger stumbles across it. Once the blog started I stopped writing my 750 words a day. Who wants to be obligated to two websites? I know, I should do both. It has already been a week since my last post. A whole week flew by and this blog was lost somewhere in the back of my mind. Even now I am fighting to keep my attention on writing; distracted by facebook, friends messaging me, texts, phone calls. It is taking all of my will power not to just save a draft and go play Final Fantasy 7 for the rest of the night. But it is important for me to finish, since I already started, so here I am.

It is February, my least favorite month of the year for whatever reason, and luckily the shortest. March is Script Frenzy, another month-long writing challenge, except instead of a novel, you write a script. I'm sure you probably could have figured that out from the name. I decided to do it back in December. After dreading coming up with a story, I decided to finally write the zombie story that I have been kicking around my brain for the last three years. Since I was so ill prepared for the last writing challenge (mostly because I didn't know about it until it started) one would think that I would spend this  month gearing up for my script. One would think. I have a rough outline (very rough) of what I want to happen and about a page of story. I suppose it is better that nothing.

This brings me back to the original problem: I have too many projects. If you have been keeping track, there is the novel, the blog, and the zombie script. Not to mention the never ending quest for employment. I have created so many things to keep me productive and motivated that I have done just the opposite. All I want to do is watch movies and play video games.  Maybe I will watch zombie movies for "research".