Gathering Wool....

In her book Bird by Bird, writer Anne Lamott talks about her practice of forcing herself to do some writing each day, even if she doesn't feel like it, and how a lot of the time she gets started by "gathering wool" This, of course, is a cute way of explaining the random stuff we do when we are supposed to sit down and do something, but instead go off on tangents, trying to avoid the task at hand.

And that's what I'm doing right now.

A couple weeks ago I enjoyed the thrill of having completed my first ebook...for about a half hour. And then I discovered that the file was too large to upload anywhere. So I spent hours resizing all the graphics and photos and tried again. No dice. So then I decided to break the one large book down to several smaller books, which in theory would work out well. In reality, though, I'm struggling with it.

I didn't want to just chop up the book into smaller sections as sell them that way. They need nice covers. And introductions. And if I'm going to break them into smaller books, I have to decide which sections get which essays that I had sprinkled throughout the big book. And, some of the smaller books made me think that I could actually add one or two or three or more additional items to them, because, you know, who wants to sell a dinky ebook that's only 10 pages? Some of the books would require quite a bit of rewriting because of the way I would market it.

So I'm sitting here with so much hard work done, but needing to press through to finish. I have some good marketing opportunities open to me if I can finish any of these before the end of the month. Ideally, I would finish them by then. My second choice deadline would be to finish before I have my quiet retreat in a few weeks, because I don't want to spend my retreat feeling like I should get stuff done that's on my To Do list. The third choice deadline is that this simply HAS to be finished by the end of the year. I'm sick of having this hanging over my head, and have a lot more projects I want to get to. These have to get done.

And I'm sitting here at the computer in my pajamas, with a child watching a stupid Thumbelina video a few feet away.

As I'm said before, I just don't do well at tasks that I don't feel inspired about. Sometimes if I just get started on something, the inspiration comes and I get on a pretty good roll. I'm hoping for that today. So far, though, I'm just gathering wool....