My writing rhythm is off.
That’s been the case for the last couple of weeks, since returning from the holiday break — I almost wrote “that’s been the case all year,” but that felt misleading, even if it would have been factually correct. Nonetheless, I’ve been off since returning to the holidays, finding it unusually hard to sit down and concentrate on one particular thing instead of finding multiple different things to think about and distract me.
Partially, this comes from trying to keep multiple balls in the air for the newsletter, so as to allow for me to hit the self-imposed “two a week, one of which has some original reporting” deadline that I gave myself, before realizing how time consuming and overwhelming that actually is to work under. (I really should have started smaller; alas.) Every day now starts with emails and checking in on stories and trying to make sure things are moving along in relatively timely manners on multiple things, even as I try not to get too upset by the multiple things that run aground despite the best intentions of all involved.
(This week alone, for example, three things that were in process might have fallen off the docket for various reasons; none of that is really anyone’s fault per se, but each one means that I’ll need to come up with a replacement story and pretty quickly, considering.)
And so, by the time I get around to actually writing anything, I’m already scattered and in a frame of mind that almost refuses to concentrate on the task at hand — something made all the more difficult by needing to break that concentration when it does happen to take the dog outside to pee, or to deal with any number of other outside interruptions that happen every day. As a result, I’m writing less, and failing to find my rhythm.
Maybe that’s next week’s problem.