It's a long boring story about how I got my laptop. (So just pretend you already slept through that one.) I didn't want a laptop. When I got the thing, I didn't like it. It has a very bad habit that annoys me. I'll be typing along and suddenly the cursor jumps up to another line. No warning--there you are typing your latest thought in the middle of some other sentence. I've gotten so I read along as I type, just to make sure I'm still where I'm supposed to be.
But for the past year, I haven't been able to write in my office. It's become goof-off central. Oh, I can do blogs, write e-mails, and work on promotion, but I can't seem to work on my books. Hello! That's my job. I'm supposed to report to the office every day and produce literature (or at least have a whack at it). But it hasn't worked out that way.
When the deadline was getting tight, I decided one day to take the hated laptop to the dining room table and see what happened. At first, I didn't log into the Internet for fear I'd just make the dining room a goof-off annex, but it hasn't worked out that way. I have a boom box, so I've got music, and I have access to mail, and Tweetdeck, and Facebook, and, most importantly, GOOGLE. I didn't realize how much I depended on Google for research until I decided not to use the Internet in the dining room. (That lasted about a week.)
The current manuscript is going pretty well. (They never seem to gel for me until I get close to the 50,000 word mark.) I'm still seriously short on word count, but June has been good to me. Of course, I have two more books to write in the next nine months, so I'm really sweating it. But buckling down and concentrating on getting my daily word count (which I often miss), is good. I feel like the little engine that could. If I get something substantial done at least five days a week, I feel fairly good about it. (And if I exceed my word count, I'm absolutely ecstatic.)
Oops--just looked at the clock. Time to fire up the laptop and get back to work.
