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The Holidays are here.

Icky.

I generally don’t like the holidays. This dates back to my retail working history. To this day, almost 30 years on, the smell of artificial cinnamon ANYTHING will make me abandon all thought I have of shopping as I turn tail and head for the door.

I try to get all my Christmas shopping done by October so I don’t have to worry about shipping, or malls, or driving anywhere or any kind of shopping at all except groceries. Even for groceries, I’d rather hit the grocery store up at 7am on a Tuesday during the holidays. And If we don’t absolutely need it, I have no problems NOT going to the store at all.

All to avoid holiday stress. So I can be calm and orderly and have plenty of time and mental energy to focus on writing.

At least, that’s the plan.

As we all know, no plan ever survives contact with the enemy.

Just about all of my shopping is done. The presents are 90% wrapped. The tree…well it was never put away last year because when my husband asked when are we going to take it down I told him there was no rule stating that he couldn’t do it because I’m TIRED AND EVERYTHING HURTS ALL THE TIME and he knew where the storage box was and all that.

He agreed that was a true statement, and the subject never came up again.

I mean, the decorations are boxed, but the tree is still up, so, that’s a thing that I can technically check off my list for holiday prep. I’ll take my wins where I can.

It’s the writing thing.

Yes, I’m still complaining about it.

Ideas are slowly starting to filter back in, but,dammit, it’s like pulling teeth from a platypus.

And planting my butt in the chair to work, as satisfying as I KNOW IT IS to create like that, still gets easily side-lined by the horrifyingly subtle addiction to YouTube (DON’T JUDGE ME!)

Did I mention I may have Jury Duty over the Holidays? My summons is the 15th, so I guess I’ll see where that goes.

My pain and exhaustion that I’d been dealing with for years has decreased dramatically since foot surgery in June, so that’s cleared up a lot of ickiness. I’m over October COVID, Halloween public school plague #37, and Thanksgiving flu. I have my own dedicated workspace for ALL THE THINGS!, which is enormously helpful.

I didn’t get around to organizing my writing notes by file folder until two weeks ago because the thought of doing it was icky (not as icky as Christmas shopping for teenagers who DON’T TELL YOU ANYTHING UNTIL THE LAST MINUTE AND HAVE NO IDEA WHAT TO GET THEIR SIBLING WHILE YOU ARE TAKING THEM SHOPPING, but still icky). I’ve organized my writing area now so everything is nice and orderly AND OH HEY WHAT’S THAT NEW THING I WANT TO DO NOW THAT I HAVE ALL THIS GLORIOUS SPACE TO DO EVERYTHING IN UNINTERRUPTED!?

So, now, I guess we’re working on focus and discipline for writing.

Do you think Santa can package that up for me with a nice pretty bow?

Check out the Insecure Writer’s Support Group to see more writers dish about their concerns, their solutions to various problems, or how they’ve decided that they’re going to dress up as Krampus this year, just to shake things up a bit.