Rise or loaf

I confess I have been very lazy in the last few weeks about working on the second draft of my novel. It's going to take some focussed attention to resolve the big problem in the second half of the book -- the weakness in how well a secondary character, and her relationship with one of the protagonists, is defined -- and my attention has been very scattered. I've gone to see some films, I went to the big peace march, I've been putting in four miles on the treadmill several times a week, but I've also wasted great amount of time.

My friend Ellen, a former architect, now teaches snowboarding for seven months of the year in Alaska and does some architectural model-building work to get her through the warm months. Happily, she gets paid for what she likes to do. But when she's not even doing that, she usually has a quite gleeful attitude about doing nothing, which she calls "loafing."

I don't even have to work at the moment. I have enough time to do exactly what I want to do, namely to write, for the next several months while my unemployment holds out. All I have to do is do it. Yet I don't.

Well, Cris is going to El Salvador for a few weeks tomorrow, so I've been telling myself I'll get a lot done while she's gone. And I'm definitely planning on going away for 4 to 6 weeks starting in May, which should give me plenty of time to finish the second draft.

Meanwhile, I've been getting ideas for new novels that are very unlike the ideas I usually get. My usual ideas are very realistic, to the point of being dull. But in the last ten days I've had two ideas that are sort of fantasy/sci-fi ideas. One was to write about a hyper-consumerist world in which society was organized entirely around buying more and more manufactured crap. The title is "Arise, Bright Engines of Transaction!"