We’ll have to wait and see if NaNoWriMo plunges me right back into the pit. It could happen. I have a basic premise for the story and one character and that’s it. Not exactly a strong platform to go into NaNo on, but it’s what I have so I’m going to work it. My plan is to embrace this as a chance to feel out the story and find out how to tell it. I don’t expect anything good but I’m not going to resort to any of the word-padding ideas so popular in November. We’ll see how it goes.

In other news, my poem After The Storm is up at Tales of the Zombie War. They have a comment option so you can tell me how much you hate it (Kidding, please don’t. I want you to like it. Like it, I say! :-p).

Finally, World of Warcraft has recently gone through a very disruptive patch. It’s been kinda crazy and overwhelming, in no small part because I have far too many characters with too many specs that I need to relearn how to play. Still, I’m muddling through. Right before the patch, however, I allowed my WoW nerdiness and my fiction writing to collide and snuck off to take a screenshot to share.

Please note, this screenshot is rather spoilerific if you’ve not read Shades of Green. Also, if you’ve not read Shades of Green you won’t likely find it very amusing, so click with caution.

This is my druid, Z’thandra. As of right now she is level 71. I wanted to take a shot of her before they took away my tree form, and what better place than one of the swamps in WoW that helped inspire the swamp in Aphanasia?

I hope this made you smile, it did me

I have the attention span of a gnat.

This needs to change.

After a lot of consideration and discussions with friends who find themselves in similar positions as well as those who don’t, I have a theory. I think I have trained myself to be unfocused. This was obviously unintentional, but I think it’s what happened.

A few years ago when I was building websites and such for a living I had a livejournal and an ICQ account. I would check LJ once a day and keep ICQ up and running while I worked. That meant I could communicate with people if I needed or wanted to, but I wasn’t leaving the window or webpage I was on to do it. Fast forward to now and I have a LiveJournal, a Facebook account, a couple blogs and a twitter account. Discounting the blogs because they don’t fall into the same category — I have a lot more distractions. Firstly, Facebook and twitter update a lot more often than LJ. My twitter feed changes every couple minutes, that means I’m refreshing that page every couple minutes and in order to do that, I’m leaving the window I’m currently working in. Add to that the ability to get sidetracked following links or playing games on Facebook and really, it’s no wonder my brain is so fragmented and frazzled.

This hasn’t just affected my work, by the way. Look at my World of Warcraft account as another example. I play on two servers (one less than the other). On each of those servers I have 10 characters. 10. That’s the maximum. Why? Because I don’t seem to be able to focused on any one toon for very long.

The good news is I figure if I trained myself to be unfocused, unproductive and to have a short attention span, I can untrain myself too. (Is untrain a word?). Starting immediately during work hours I am only going to allow myself to check Facebook and Twitter once a day. That’s it. Just once. The same goes for Livejournal. During my off-hours I’ll ease up on myself a little bit. I will continue to check Twitter while I’m taking a long flight in WoW for example, but I need to force myself to focus when I should be working and maybe actually get something done now and then. The way things are right now is ridiculous.

Wish me luck, I might need it.