Exactly.
Since the New Year I have been obsessively chipping away at the manuscript for a project that's been slow cooking for a couple years now. This is good, as it means I'm making nightly progress and at the end of every week I can look back and count the amount of new pages that have survived the laborious transition from brain to computer. Tangible progress is being made, to the extent that the finish line is in sight. Within a month or two I should have a completed manuscript that can be read from start to finish.
The downside to spending one's time writing, however, is that the only thing I then have to write about is this: writing. Only other writers would be interested in reading about that, and then only non-writing writers desperate to live vicariously through someone who manages to sit and stare at Microsoft Word for three hours a night while clicking on plastic keys.
Sit poorly, might I add. I hunch like I'm assembling a puzzle that forms a massage therapist ad.
Also: I guess I am lying when I say that things haven't been happening to me beyond writing. I wanted to write about my crippling guilt over abandoning my '98 Corolla for a shiny '08 Scion TC. I wanted to write about the overwhelming joy I felt on January 20th, and the ripples of pride I still feel when I hear the words "President Obama." I wanted to write about the queasy horror of reading about bush fires sliding all over an area of Australia I visited last October. I want to write a review of the Lonely Island CD.
I would write about all these things and more, but here's the catch: I am too busy destroying my back and staring at Microsoft Word for three hours a night while clicking on plastic keys.
You can't have everything.
