This morning, due to various factors both in and out of my control, I sat down to write for the first time in several weeks.
It was great to be back. I killed it. I busted out a scene in chapter 12 (yes, I’m still in dreaded chapter 12) that will give you chills. I was in the zone. I realized how much I missed writing. Ah, this is the life, I remembered. Waking up and plunging into the story headfirst, walking and breathing alongside my characters.Sometimes you need to take a break from something to realize how much you really want that thing in your life.
It felt so good that after a lunch/nap break, I decided to go for another round. There was no reason not to. My sweetheart is out of town so I have the place to myself, I didn’t have any dinner plans, and by gum if I could get through another scene today, I’d be done with the dreaded Chapter 12 and ready to move on to the even more dreaded Chapter 13.
That’s when I came into the living room and found the cat on my writing chair. Not just sitting or laying, but sprawled out in that “this is mine, touch me and you die” way that only a cat can sprawl on something.
“Meow,” she said.
“Indeed,” I said.
If you’re a cat owner and a writer, you’ll know exactly what happened next. Within seconds I was sitting in a different chair at a different computer, checking my email, browsing the newsfeed on facebook, watching a compilation of funny cats-being-mean videos on youtube and pondering the irony of the fact that I was watching cats in confrontations in order to avoid a confrontation with my cat.
Of course, I’m not really so weak-willed that I’d let a cat come between me and my passion. But I will use the cat on my chair as an excuse to goof off when I should be dancing with my Muse. Which got me thinking about the excuses we use not to write (or whatever it is that we really want to do). I mean, really, I can’t write because the cat’s in my writing chair? There are so many solutions to that problem that it doesn’t qualify as an actual problem at all. I write on a laptop, so location is not really key. There are at least ten other chairs in my house I could have used if I was too weak or kind or weird to just pick up the cat and move her to another comfy nap location. But that was my first thought when I came into the living room. Oh darn, I can’t write because the cat’s on my chair.
While this is a really weak excuse, and I was able to see it as such due to the sheer ridiculousness, I have a hundred more, seemingly legitimate ones. I’m tired, I already wrote today, no one’s going read this damn thing anyway, the kitchen really needs a deep clean, you know I haven’t exercised in a while, maybe I should do some yoga instead. These are all different from procrastination, mind. Procrastination involves things to do before you write. Excuses are reasons why you can’t write. Two entirely different things, although their result is often the same.
My sidetrack to the other chair had an unexpected result: kitty was so curious about what I was doing over there that she got up. Ha-Ha. Selah J Tay-Song 1, curious cat 0. Spurred into action, I watched one more short video, this one of a crow feeding a cat and a dog bits of something that looked like pasta salad from a tupperware container (google it, it was really pretty amazing) and then I grabbed my chair.
So now I’m out of excuses. Time to write.
