Inspiration?

For the past two or three weeks I've been completely uninspired to work on my writing. I thought it was spring fever making me lose focus. At least, that's where I lay the blame. Each time I sat at the computer, rather than open up a document, I checked email or browsed the very long list of sites on my favorites list--writer and reader blogs, reader forums, publisher sites, MySpace, and even the weather.

Then, when I got up this morning, something unusual happened. The cable was out. No tv and no internet. After putting in a call to the cable company, who informed me there was an area-wide outage, I settled in with a little housework. When I figured I'd done enough of that, I finally ended up at the computer. And you know what. I ended up writing 2,288 words today, which is a very good writing day for me. I didn't have the distraction of pulling up email, or checking to see the latest on my favorite reader blog. All I could do was sit here and write, and I actually lost myself in it for quite a while. The result was fingers flying on the keyboard to try and keep up with the narrative and dialogue scrolling through my head. It was terrific!

So now I have to admit that my husband has been correct all these years. He's always told me, if I turned the energy I spend writing emails and cruising around the internet toward my writing, I could turn out several books a year. I always denied the truth of that because, frankly, I didn't want to admit the amount of time I waste each day purely on entertainment. But now that it's looking me straight in the eye, I'm going to have to face the fact and reassess how I spend my time each day. I have no wish to give up email or some of the things I do online, but many of the things I'm currently doing in the name of trying to keep abreast of what's going on within the romance community are a complete waste of valuable time.

I see so many authors in cyberspace that make me wonder how they ever get anything written. They're here, there, and everywhere. Some of these authors have built big careers from their writing and are very prolific, but I'll be darned if I can figure out how they do it all.

Peace,

Devon