There’s probably some author that will tell me “you’ve got it easy. You’ve got stable Internet, a roof over your head, food on your table, and no dangerous issues coming up. Yes, the smoke from the fire sucks, but you have air conditioning and unless they shut the power grid off that powers the nearby Kaiser, you’re good.”
Got that. Agree with you, even.
My problem? I’m stuck in a house with three adults (this Labor Day, when I was hoping to be at DragonCon again), and we’re…civil with each other. Yea, that’s a good word…civil. We’re all under stress, nobody is happy, I’m currently unemployed, all that fun stuff. But, my situation could be worse and I am grateful for what I have.
Unfortunately, my work space is exactly ninety degrees to starboard of the main house TV and my parents (who I live with) are CNN junkies.
Seriously, CNN has their programming built to work as a Skinner Box. It’s all breathless, provoking, demanding production values that make you want to watch to see what particular scandals and disasters and chaos are happening and you can’t help but to watch and see what is going on. And, the language used is breathless and reinforces the precious narrative that they’re trying to tell.
And, you can almost tell they have it timed down to the second on their stories to give people watching it an incomplete cortisol hit. It’s almost like getting half a hit of cocaine-you get part of the joy and you want that rest of it, so you’re there watching…
It doesn’t help when you’re trying to write a fight scene and you’re hearing “ripped from the headlines” blurbs that drag you out of your immersion. Seriously, you’re writing up the best way for girls at a high school cafeteria table to snark about how one of them is positive that your character isn’t a murderer-
BAD ORANGE MAN CONSPIRING WITH RUSSIAN MAGICAL INTERNET HACKERS TO STEAL ELECTION!!!
(I swear, I almost hear that one time.)
I can’t ask them to change the channel, it’s their house, their TV, and they’ll suggest that I go to my room and work there. I have a laptop, I can work there! (Please ignore the sarcasm, I know they mean this in the kindest of ways.)
I need a desk. I need a real keyboard, a real monitor, and a real mouse. Laptops never seemed to be the right thing for serious work for me. I need to sit at a chair and work.
Get to my desk early? Parents wake up at 5-6 AM to get my sister off to work.
Work in the evenings? My writing brain pretty much starts going bad after 9 PM. Which frustrates me because I used to be able to bang out stories until 1-2 AM not that long ago.
Stuff is getting done, this really is more just of a “frustration venting” posting. It’s not getting done as fast as I would like. But, it is getting done.
Big Bootay Books 