{"id":2142,"date":"2019-09-13T06:49:41","date_gmt":"2019-09-13T06:49:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/?p=2142"},"modified":"2019-09-13T07:44:19","modified_gmt":"2019-09-13T07:44:19","slug":"slow-punctures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/2019\/09\/13\/slow-punctures\/","title":{"rendered":"Slow punctures"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I don&#8217;t think that it&#8217;s very often the case that we stop writing something because of a big situation that defeats us. It&#8217;s much more often that something small gets in the way and we&#8217;re deflated.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s just been a week of slow punctures, for some reason. There was a problem at a venue, for instance, but not only did it work out fine, I didn&#8217;t have to do one single bit of the working out. It was all done for me, to the extent that if I hadn&#8217;t arrived just when it was going down, there&#8217;d have been no way for me to even know there had been a problem.<\/p>\n<p>And it&#8217;s not as if it really threw me. By the time the event started, I was Performance William, and the only difference was that climbing up to that was a fraction harder than normal. Even then, it was such a small fraction harder that I&#8217;d not have noticed, except that the entire week has been a list of these.<\/p>\n<p>Projects going wrong because I made mistakes, projects going wrong because someone else did. The misunderstood email, the notification on your phone at 3am that you shouldn&#8217;t have read and can&#8217;t do anything about except worry.<\/p>\n<p>I am really tired this week, and multiple bad nights in a row are not helping. But lying there, thinking about how you and I would be getting to chat now, I did realise a couple of things.<\/p>\n<p>One is that this is a pretty normal week. <\/p>\n<p>But the other is that I&#8217;ve noticed it, that I&#8217;m embarrassed to say I&#8217;ve been grumpy about it, at least in part because I haven&#8217;t been writing.<\/p>\n<p>Well, I mean, I have. I&#8217;ve written thousands of words, but they&#8217;ve all been published. (Around 2,000 is being translated into Dutch even as we speak. That&#8217;s new.)<\/p>\n<p>But for about a month up until actually just about the time we spoke last week, I&#8217;ve also been writing a play. There is some interest in it, but not much and it&#8217;s really just for me. So I hope it will get produced, but right now it was not written on a deadline, it was not published and perhaps this particular one never will be.<\/p>\n<p>I have just been substantially more grumpy since I finished it and have nothing to write except for all these things I have to write. Since I finished it and am not writing anything except for all these things I&#8217;m writing.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a bit of an obvious solution though, isn&#8217;t there? Screw the overnight Facebook messages, sod all the slow punctures, I need to get the next thing written.<\/p>\n<p>Thanks. That helped.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I don&#8217;t think that it&#8217;s very often the case that we stop writing something because of a big situation that &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/2019\/09\/13\/slow-punctures\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[178],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-selfdistract"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4chyI-yy","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2142"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2142\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2145,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2142\/revisions\/2145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}