The thing about not writing is that sooner or later I get back to thinking that I want to again. I felt so burned by NaNoWriMo that I’d pretty much decided I wasn’t a writer and to stop trying to pretend I could be one. However last night I felt like maybe I wanted to write something, just for me, just because I felt I wanted to.
The thing about me though is I’m a classic procrastinator and I always find a task related to what I’m supposed to be doing to do instead. Oh, it’s not intended to be instead, just before – but somehow it always seems to take all the time available. So I end up re-organising my bookcase/ebook library instead of actually reading, or the usual one for writing is re-organising my writing folders.
This time it was something else, it was music.
I’ve been listening to this a lot:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbFzQ65V-fc]
and it occurred to me that this was the perfect music to write to – calming, pretty and instrumental (lyrics distract me and tend to find their way into what I’m writing). In fact it was as much the fact that this would be perfect to write to as any desire to write per se that made me want to do it.
So I sat down to write. But first I decided I was going to get the album this guy did. I checked and it wasn’t available on Amazon or 7Digital – which was a shame because those are generally easier to use. Instead I had to go to iTunes – which was a frustrating experience. To be fair most of that was not really Apple’s fault.
First in order to run iTunes I needed to boot into Windows and though I have Windows on my main laptop the one with my iTunes account set up is on my netbook. And my netbook is great for certain things, but it’s fiddly to use if you need to do a lot of clicking and it’s worse somehow in Windows. Not really Apple’s fault – except in that they refuse to support Linux.
Second problem was that my credit card details have expired. So I had to go find my wallet and do the necessary.
After that while it was downloading I used the time to… not write, God no, I tried to install an up to date version of Scrivener. Which either means the Windows version under wine (works quite well with a few quirks) or the Linux beta (they’re time-limited and I couldn’t find the download for a version that hadn’t expired).
Finally once the album had downloaded I transferred it from netbook to laptop using… Dropbox. Because I’m stupid and I can I used a method that took ~30mins instead or 3mins using a memory stick.
After I finally had the tracks on my laptop I imported them into Banshee and played whilst I re-read all the stories I’d written for Slingink’s 2011 Story Slam (formerly Eurofiction). Then Melissa rang and that was my evening.
As an aside, the reason I re-read those stories was because I hadn’t looked at them since I wrote them, hadn’t talked about them. The reason for that was that after Nano I was feeling a bit brusied but didn’t want to just give up on Story Slam so I forced myself to finish it but resented the time I spent writing. A couple of them ended up being a bit weird because of that.
Anyway, here’s another track from Acoustic Labs:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJ-FTJhwmuw]
Album available here (warning: iTunes may cause frustration!)