Paralysis of Will

I have
so much
to do.

Funny. I have more time than ever, and yet I still have so much to do. I have manuscripts waiting for rewrites and ideas waiting for first drafts. I have a presidential campaign to run and a home to maintain. Like any of you, I have a to do list a mile long. In fact, I am so anal about remembering what to do that I have lists to tell me where I left my lists. My lists are full of redundancies, but they do contain some of my most concise thinking on paper.

The point is (yes, I have a point), I suffer frequently from a paralysis of will. I don't wanna. I don't wanna run the vacuum, go to the grocer's, write the next article, work on the novel. "Bunheads" distracts me. Fighting with my Internet router so I can get enough signal on the laptop in the living room distracts me. Picking up an old manuscript that was never finished and reading it to discover, yes, I know how to put words together, keeps me from putting words together,

I avoid writing like the plague. I avoid re-writing as if it were Armageddon meeting me head on.

I have said this before, because it happened before. It happens often. That's the bane of my craft, at least for me, and I feel guilt and a bit of self-loathing about it. Even writing this blog, dusting off the cobwebs of my mind, so to speak, won't help, because now I am thinking not about the book that only needs a good polish to finish, but the manuscript I read through last night that essentially needs a total reboot.

And I work on neither. Sometimes I just don't see the point, sometimes I just want to play, sometimes I just don't have the energy. Right now, I have to go get the mail.