Distractions

Umm... yeah.  I hate it when I make promises to myself and don't follow through on them.  It's worse when I do it publicly.  I obviously didn't get to the friend's bios.  I didn't get an updated outline.  I didn't get to start the writing process.

Truth be told, it was a combination of not feeling inspired and being distracted.   The lack of inspiration isn't surprising as my interest in (and fear of) doing this waxes and wanes.  I'm hoping that once the ground work is laid that I'll be able to bypass this reason for not writing.

But no matter what happens distractions will always be something that can derail my best laid plans.  And since I've gone on and on about inspirations, I figured I might as well open this door and talk a bit about distractions as well.


Distractions come in all varieties.  The most common is internal distractions.  If I get caught up in my own thoughts and follow them, I can place myself firmly into Calvin's space.  Thinking about getting a job, wondering how long I should keep trying before giving up, wondering what giving up would look like, worrying about bills, worrying about the car, worrying about family or 3D friends.... once i start thinking about these things the idea of spending ANY time writing out a story seems trivial and a waste of time.

That's not to say that these things distract me from being Caitlyn... they just stop me from writing a story.  I can still (and often do) cap while having these thoughts.  But making a cap is different.  I know that I can make a good cap.  I know that at least some people will enjoy the cap.  Making a cap is using a lot of different muscles that are practiced and easy to do.  If I want to explore something new (a story line, a design, a layout...) it can still be framed by the ease of which I can do every other part of the cap.  But writing out a story like this has none of those advantages.  I don't know if I can be successful in writing out a story.  I don't know if anyone will get any enjoyment out of it, and it's so new to me that it feels slow, difficult, and rife with potholes that trip me up.

So that fear of doing something really 'new' lets me get distracted away a lot easier.  Even staying completely 'Caitlyn' can be distracting.  I wonder how my last cap is coming across... I wonder what new caps other's are making... I wonder how the role playing at DX is going... I wonder if I should just be making a cap instead...

Just about any non focused thought process can make me stop working on the story.  I think once I get to the actual writing that it will be a little easier.  That first step is always the hardest.  But even if I can concentrate, there are a whole host of external distractions that will be sure to derail me.

For instance... the last half of last week was spent playing with Windows 8.  I finally pulled the string and purchased Windows 8 on the very last day that it was available for $39.99.  Call it a late birthday gift, or loan against the tax refund I'll be getting soon (YAY Earned Income Credit!).  When I downloaded it I decided to embark on a little experiment.  Instead of following my tried and true path (formatting the drive and installing an OS clean), I went the true upgrade path.  I was hoping that this would both be faster than a full install and that it would fix some issues that had been cropping up with Windows 7.

I've never been sold on he idea of 'upgrading' an OS.  When I've tried it in the past I've most often found that you get to keep all the problems you had before, add new problems, and can even completely 'break' the OS.  So to make sure I'd be safe, I spent a good amount of time backing everything up.  My documents, my images, my videos, my emails (pre-gmail emails.. I've only been using the cloud to store my emails for about a year now), the random files I have stored around the computer and of course my erotica (which is deeply hidden and contains all of my caps).  Backing up everything took hours.


The actual upgrade took over an hour itself.  To me that seemed to be a really long time.  I installed the consumer preview of Windows 8 before and it took about 20 minutes.  But hey... this is my first try at the actual release of Windows 8 so maybe it's supposed to take that long.  Once it was finally up and running I then 'played'.  I'm sure you can understand playing with a new toy, and Windows 8 has quite a few features that are brand new.

Once I could stop grinning, I started putting my data back.  That took several hours and lead me up to bedtime.  The next day I started in on testing.  Testing to see how fast this new ride was.  Testing to see if all the programs still worked.  Testing the boot and shutdown speeds.  And sadly... testing is where I found that every problem I had in Windows 7 was still in Windows 8.  A particular program still refused to close upon shutdown.  The computer wouldn't go to sleep on its own with any consistency  (although it would go to sleep when I manually told it to).  The video driver was still on the flaky side.

So... I could either keep working like this and never really know if Windows 8 was better or worse than 7, or I could bite the bullet and do a clean install.  I bit that bullet.  I backed up the few changes I had made, formatted the drive and installed Windows 8 clean.  The install only took about 20 minutes from start to finish... so yeah I HATE upgrading all the more now.  After I confirmed that all the previous problems were no longer present I went on to installing and setting up all my programs again.

That whole process started  on Thursday the 31st, and ended yesterday afternoon (the 3rd).  I'm still getting used to the new Windows and don't have EVERYTHING installed, but I'm more or less good to go now.

Now obviously most distractions won't take me away for four days, but something taking me away for even a couple hours can keep me from writing anything that day.  Hopefully today won't be distracting and I can hunker down and finish up with the foundation of the story!