You know that saying, 'I came,I saw, I conquered.' Well I feel a little bit like that when it comes to this blog, only it's more a case of 'I came, I Felt A Bit Guilty, I Procrastinated.'
Ok, so it's not remotely like the first phrase, but still. I can't believe we're midway through October,and this is only the first time I have sat down to blog. I was fully prepared to give the whole 'blog every day in October' thingy a decent attempt. I even had ideas for the requests that had already started to trickle in. But for some reason, whenever I make plans, everything goes 'tits up' (as we say in Cardiff).
Why is that? I mean, planning should mean that everything goes,well, to plan. Or at least more or less. But I am one of those people who seems to manage better when there is not a sign of a plan in sight.
The biggest thing that stuffed up my plan was the fact that my employers sold their shop, giving the staff less than two weeks' notice. The new owner took over our contracts on the 28th September. What we were hoping to be a smooth transition has turned out to be our worst nightmare. I won't get into details, but suffice to say that two of the fourteen staff members have already left, one has decided to retire early, and the rest of us are desperately seeking new employment. A time consuming, tedious, and often depressing turn of events, not least because there really aren't many jobs out there at the moment.
The smallest thing that has affected my good intentions (though it is just as annoying) is the fact that my laptop is dying. Again. I've actually lost count of how many laptops/computers have died on me in the last eight years. I could probably work it out if I thought about it, but it is too depressing to even make the effort. Once again, the soon-to-be fatal flaw is a wonky keyboard. When I say wonky, I mean that it is just not doing what it is supposed to do. So far it is just the space bar that is misbehaving (I have tried to catch all of the words that have been squashed together due to the space bar not working properly, but I'm sure I'll have missed a few). Actually, the 'b' isn't always showing either (added this bit on my read through, but only after spending a few seconds wondering what on earth I meant by 'log every day in October').
Granted, it's not as bad as when half the letters on my keyboard didn't work during the Boken Keboa era (nor nearly as funny), but it is just so time consuming trying to type, and having to pause and go back after almost every word. It's also terribly fwuztwatin (couldn't resist using probably my favourite ever made-up word from the Boken Keboa dictionary).
In between the big and the small things that have stuffed me up, there are the various bits in between. The usual, everyday things that mean I can't get as much access to the internet as I would like. Work, kids, life... that sort of thing. And of course, there is the anxiety that I can't quite manage to control over the fate of my novel submission. Almost seven weeks have passed since I hit 'send' (or, to be truthful, hit 'save draft' by mistake, then realised the next day that I'd messed up *shifty*), and I still have another nine weeks before I can chase up the publishers.
And I've procrastinated, obviously. Wouldn't be me if I didn't. (Ooh, the caps lock keeps sticking too, forgot to mention that. Half of this post would have been SHOUTING at you if I hadn't have used the backspace button so often [luckily that one is still working]).
Anyway, that's all I want to ramble about at the moment.There's only so much backspacing and deleting a girl can take...
Image borrowed from here. Incidentally, I love the fact that when I searched Google images for 'boken keboa', it knew EXACTLY what I was looking for. *snort*
