{"id":1374,"date":"2011-11-19T23:29:13","date_gmt":"2011-11-20T05:29:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/?p=1374"},"modified":"2011-11-19T23:29:13","modified_gmt":"2011-11-20T05:29:13","slug":"the-distracted-writer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/?p=1374","title":{"rendered":"The Distracted Writer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some distractions I can work right through.\u00a0 Others…I can’t.\u00a0\u00a0 Thanksgiving is one of those others.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s the holiday on which I indulge my love for cooking and entertaining occasionally<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Occasionally, because I do a huge lump of work for Thanksgiving, and I’m not going to put out that much effort every week or so, or I couldn’t write books.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Holiday music is another.\u00a0\u00a0 Again this year our choir is singing Messiah with the Austin Symphony.\u00a0\u00a0 And this year, the first rehearsal was today, Saturday, and the next is Monday…yes, this Monday, the Monday before Thanksgiving.\u00a0 EEEEEPPP!!!I’ve been doing Thanksgiving dinners with friends for over forty years now. \u00a0 In an uncluttered year (book deadline was August, say, and I wasn’t singing in this chorus), I have the system all laid out. \u00a0 The prep starts several weeks out, leisurely adding elements one at a time.\u00a0 No stress. \u00a0 The final days, starting on Saturday, each have their prep tasks, and I arrive at dawn on T-day (about when the turkey(s) start cooking) rested and sane.<\/p>\n

Two long Messiah<\/em> rehearsals in that critical period are…pushing my limits.\u00a0\u00a0 Each is 2-3 hours of rehearsal–tiring, because very, very intense.\u00a0\u00a0 And 2-3 hours of driving from here to the rehearsal site, through increasingly fraught traffic.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 That’s a minimum of 5 hours out of my prep time for each rehearsal, or 10 hours altogether.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Plus the hours I had to spend transferring director’s marks from a .pdf file into the score–and will have to do again, because one of my Messiah<\/em> scores–the new one I bought last year, and had bound in black, and then didn’t get to sing from–has vanished into the end-of-book chaos in the house.\u00a0 It should have been with the older Messiah<\/em> score, the one with the front black binding sheet now tearing away from the spiral binding.<\/p>\n

And I need those hours…not just for prep, but for the book, which–because I’m distracted–is now dead in the water, and leaking at every seam.\u00a0\u00a0 The chain-sawing revealed its flaws, and I tried all week to get one particular scene written…and couldn’t.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The phone would ring, someone would ask a question\u00a0 about what to bring, or would I send money to this candidate;\u00a0 someone in the family would ask me things, like what else might be on the grocery list for the next trip, or if I’d decided whether the turkeys should defrost in this fridge or the other one…and another email would come from the director about the music…or from an editor…or from someone who had to be answered.<\/p>\n

Tomorrow we sing second service only, a particularly tricky anthem.\u00a0\u00a0 Then Monday the next long rehearsal.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 There’s a lot of prep work to be done Monday before I drive to the city.\u00a0 Tuesday and Wednesday will be flat-out dinner prep, from kitchen work to preparing the room in which the dinner will be given and making sure that the rest of the houses are decent enough for company as far as company is allowed.\u00a0\u00a0 (No, they won’t be totally clean and tidy.\u00a0 That’s asking WAY too much.)<\/p>\n

It will all come together, and the people I invite are tolerant (or…they don’t come back. )\u00a0\u00a0 But in the meantime…I’m distracted.<\/p>\n

(Oh…the “at table” count was up to 20, dropped to 18, and is now up to 19-and-maybe-20.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 That requires two long tables, each made of two shorter tables put end to end.\u00a0\u00a0 One of the long tables is made of two dining tables of different height and width, just to be interesting.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 With that many, it’s easier to do two smaller turkeys than one huge one. )<\/p>\n

E.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some distractions I can work right through.\u00a0 Others…I can’t.\u00a0\u00a0 Thanksgiving is one of those others.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s the holiday on which I indulge my love for cooking and entertaining occasionally.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Occasionally, because I do a huge lump of work for Thanksgiving, and I’m not going to put out that much effort every week or so, or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[112],"class_list":["post-1374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-beyond-writing","tag-life-beyond-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1374"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1374"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1374\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1376,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1374\/revisions\/1376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}