Creative Overdrive

I have declared today to be my last non-holiday season day, in which I'm going to try to get everything pre-holiday taken care of. Tomorrow, I will load the Christmas music onto my phone, put up my decorations, possibly do my first round of baking, and let myself start watching the holiday movies that have been stacking up on the DVR. Then Saturday the Death March of fun begins with a vengeance, with several busy weekends in a row. This weekend isn't so bad (just a get-together, a party, and then chorale singing in two services), but next weekend will be the kind of weekend that requires a weekend to recover from. I have overlapping events Saturday, children singing Sunday morning, a concert Sunday evening, and a party after that. Sometime on either Friday or Saturday I have to bake for the church cookie swap. Everything should calm down the week before Christmas, and that may be my reading and watching Hallmark movies time, as I recover from all the socializing.

The sense of feeling busy isn't helped by the fact that my brain is in creative overdrive. It's not a bad thing necessarily, since it's awfully convenient that my brain is playing out the movie for the next scenes I need to write. There's no writer's block at all. I mostly just sit and transcribe, and sometimes try to put what I've seen into words. The downside is that all this is happening right when I wake up in the morning, when I'm in that twilight phase of being conscious but not really awake enough to want to get out of bed. I wake up with scenes playing out in my head, so I lie there and watch it all, taking mental notes, and then I lose all track of time. What seems to be five minutes turns out to have been half an hour. Sometimes I fall back asleep. As a result, I'm really oversleeping, and I lose most of the morning, which is when I do all the business and non-writing tasks I need to do, and there are a lot of those. I feel stressed when I'm feeling behind on the day.

Since I've got a book coming out, I really need to be focusing on promotion. I'd planned to get a new web site by now, but I got sidetracked by decision paralysis on finding a web designer and graphic designer to do a logo and possibly other work for the site. I'm in this bind where the people who know about me seem to really love my books, but most people don't know about me, and I don't know how to reach more people to break out of that loop. Nothing I do seems to go viral enough to really spread, and it doesn't help that a rather non-social person isn't very effective on social media. I'm writing books now because I hated doing PR. I'd be happiest hiding in a cave and writing, being the mysterious reclusive author, but it's hard to do that these days. But it's also hard to force myself to get out there with a book that's already done when I've got a book in my head that's trying to burst out, Alien-like, and all I really want to do is write it.

So I guess I'd better go either promote or write.