Midnight

I haven’t been doing the greatest job updating the blog regularly the past few weeks and there’s a very good reason for that: I’ve been writing. I’m so close to being done with this draft that it seems that every waking moment is filled with writing. This doesn’t leave a lot of time or brain power for writing a blog post. This also doesn’t allow for the kind of social interactions that generally trigger the blogging compulsion in me.

I have however been watching a lot of anime. When I’m writing I generally write for forty-five minutes to an hour at a time and then take a fifteen to twenty minute break. Your average anime episode is about twenty minutes long if you skip the opening and closing credits. Watching an episode of anime is the perfect way for me to recharge my brain between writing spurts.  And I can do chores while watching because I load the episodes onto my Kindle fire and carry it to the kitchen so I can wash dishes, or to the laundry room to fold laundry.

Now you may be asking, why bother with the anime? Why not just do the dishes and the laundry? Well, one of the things that I’ve found keeps writer’s block at bay is, oddly enough, not thinking about what I’ve just written. You see if I start thinking about what I’ve just written, I get all insecure about it, thinking about all the ways I could have written it better and then I have to go back and write it again and the whole process just repeats until I have one perfect chapter and nothing else to show for my time.

Thus the anime, which keeps me from thinking about the flaws in my writing. It’s the perfect distraction, except for the fact that most anime shows follow a single continuous story arc and every single episode ends with a cliff hanger. So, really the only time I can allow myself to watch anime is as a break from my writing, because then I’m really good at limiting myself to one episode. Any other time and I just keep hitting the next episode button until suddenly it’s midnight.

So that’s what I’ve been up to: writing and watching anime. Exciting right?

Thank you for reading.