Coming down with the bad cold that’s been going around a bit over a week ago really messed up my schedule. Besides having to cancel several planned events with friends, taking some sick time and working from home a few extra days, I haven’t had a lot of energy. Some nights I’ve had trouble sleeping. Even when I don’t, I just haven’t had much energy. On those nights that I don’t conk out shortly after dinner, I wind up staring at the computer attempting to write and not getting a lot done.

So, for instance, when I wrote and scheduled the post called, “I don’t mean to be a jerk, part 1,” I had the opening sentences of a related part 2 post sitting in the draft queue. Meanwhile, because of reading a lot of conflicting opinion pieces about the Congressman Schock speculation, I decided it was time to finish another draft post that’s been sitting in the queue for a long time, but re-cast it for the issue at hand. Because it was the first thing I finished after “I don’t mean to be a jerk, part 1,” and I still planned to finish part 2 right away, I retitled it to have the word “jerk” in the title.

But since the next day was Friday, I posted a collection of links instead of trying to finish part 2. I did try to work on part 2 after, but well, there was napping, a little work on my fiction writing, my favorite football team in the playoffs, some reading to catch up on, housework, and more napping.

And sometimes the muse just wants to work on other things. Which is why I blasted out a long post about a misheard lyric, I guess.

I’ve also been trying to finish more posts about the writing process. I really intended this blog to have a bit more of that than it has been of late. Though real world events, such as all the interesting turns the marriage equality battle and related debates have take the last year have been so much more than any of us anticipated, I feel some of the blame for that to go there.

I have been spending less time reading news than I had been, so that part of the goals I set myself this year has gone well. I’ve only been so-so on increasing my writing output in exchange. I have been spending some of the news reading time trying to write, I just haven’t been terribly productive. Mostly I’ve been staring the screen with my hands motionless on keys a lot as I read what’s there and try to make the next sentence come out of my fingers.

It’s always easier to write about what I’m not supposed to be writing about.