Yak Shaving

Catchy title, eh? I've been doing a lot of thinking about yak shaving. Thinking about yak shaving is, in itself, yak shaving. What am I talking about? Funny you should ask.

You need to do something, in this example, write. But before you can write, you realize that you need to clean off your desk. So you make piles of paper. Now you need a place to put the piles.

You can put the piles on the chair!!!

But, the chair is broken. So you fix the chair in order to have a place to put the piles of paper that were on your desk, which needed to be cleaned off before you could write.

In fixing the chair, you realize that the fabric on the seat is torn!!

So you go shopping for new fabric to re-cover the chair which you have just fixed in order to have a place on which to put the piles of paper that were on the desk which you had to clear off in order to write.

When you take off the old fabric you realize that the stuffing is really shot, and the best chair stuffing is made from yak fur.

So you find yourself in the zoo, shaving a yak, in order to have stuffing with which to reupholster the chair that you needed to re-cover in order to have a place to put the piles of paper that you cleaned of your desk in order to write.

Yak shaving is the term used by my critique group to describe the behavior that includes (but is by no means limited to) circling the desk but not being able to land on the keyboard.

Thank you for reading. I don't know what you were supposed to be doing, but you have just shaved a yak....as did I.

More later.

Getting Back To Work

Vacation is over, and I regret to say that it's time to get cracking. The key word in the above sentence is "regret". Sigh. After taking two weeks off, I'm finding it difficult to get back into "work mode". Which may be why I'm blogging.

However, I did spend some time, on vacation, ogling the real "Jason," the man behind which my fictitious character lurks. Of course any resemblence between the character and anyone living or dead is strictly a product of the writer's over-active fantasy life. That said, I'm happy to report that Jason is still as hunky as ever, still wearing leathers where necessary, and shirtless when not. Jason sightings happened daily and I'm refueled with enough fantasy material to take me to the end of the story.

Speaking of the end of the story....the story has departed from the outline once again. Why these characters won't stay where I put them is beyond me. I wonder if that happens to other writers; they create characters that then take on a life of their own and do things that are unexpected? Is it just that I'm that good at creating characters or is it that I have an undiagnosed psychosis? Not funny.

Just checking in, dear readers, to let you know that I'm back in town and back at the keyboard. Ta for now.