Friday: The Anti-Thursday



First, let's establish just how awesome Thursday was. On Thursday evening, after my amazing writing day at Starbucks and the beach, I went to a second round of callbacks for the show I'm doing this fall, where we auditioned folks who I hope will be our baritone and an additional soprano. (I'm in a production of The All-Night Strut this fall, starting rehearsals next week. It's nice and funny. I went and auditioned for The Sound of Music last fall because my wife was choreographing the show and they were having a heck of a time finding a captain. I have always been a singer rather than an actor, despite my performance in quite a number of musicals and operettas during high school and college. So I went and sang for them, but the captain's part is really low—lower, I suspect, than Christopher Plummer sang it in the movie, though I can't swear to that. So they found another captain and I played Franz, singing only off-stage for the finale! But when the director decided to do this show this year, she put me in as the tenor without an audition. :) ) Afterwards we went to Red Robin and had a hilarious time, then came home and put the boy to bed. I stayed up and wrote a little more, trying like heck to get to 3,000 words for the day. I couldn't keep my eyes open long enough, and I had to stop 51 words short. Anyway, a fabulous day.

So then Friday was completely different. After I dropped my son at school for the day, I came home rather than going to Starbucks. Let's call it a minor financial crisis. I spent a good part of the next hour trying to figure out why our bank account had roughly $175 less than we thought it should, and eventually decided that relying on online banking to give us up-to-date information about the status of our account is not particularly wise (especially when we do it on a Saturday). Anyway, the end result was a much less productive day—I strained to make it to 450 words, which is my normal daily target for the days when I'm writing for an hour before work (Mon through Thurs) before I had to go back out and pick Carter up from school. Oh, well. Clearly, not every day can be a record-breaker.

Fundamentally, I seem to have developed a mental block that prevents me from getting good work done at home. My typical excuse is that it requires a level of concentration I can't achieve when I'm regularly interrupted by questions (or triumphant exclamations about having caught Zapdos). But I don't know why I should be able to achieve that level of concentration at Starbucks, when I feel like I spend long stretches of time staring into space or people-watching. Perhaps more importantly, why is it that I can muster the concentration to write something like this when I'm home with Carter, but not work on the novel? Hmmmm?

Speaking of the novel: I made an interesting discovery the other day. If you order my novel from Amazon (see link at right), you pretty much double my royalties for that copy of the book. If you're thinking of buying it and haven't done so yet, please please please use that link to buy the book! Thanks!

Posted: Sun - July 23, 2006 at 01:48 PM        

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