You may or may not be aware that I am currently trying to write a ‘novel’. Notice the discrete use of the word ‘trying’ in there? Trying to write is very different to actually writing. Trying to write a novel, involves taking up crochet instead and subsequently embarking on a Lord of the Rings Director’s Cut Extended Edition With Bonus Extras-sized project in the shape of my Forever Blanket. Trying to write a novel also involves crocheting random gifts that I never give people and then starting a blog so I can bitch about how crocheting these random gifts is stopping me from finishing my Forever Blanket. And trying to write a novel now obviously involves bitching on this blog about how all this bitching on this blog is stopping me from finishing my Forever Blanket, NOT TO MENTION MY NOVEL. Yes, there are so many levels to my procrastination that it’s starting to sound like the plot for the next Christopher Nolan film… WHICH I MAY AS WELL START WRITING NOW INSTEAD OF MY FUCKING NOVEL.
You know… now that I think about it, my Forever Blanket and my novel are similar in many ways. For both projects, I have tools to track my progress: Scrivener tallies up my word count across multiple documents and my extremely-very-sad Excel Spreadsheet keeps track of my squares. Thanks to these tools, I know I am 150 squares into my 256 square blanket and 5,006 words into my 80,000 word novel. I find these numbers very assuring. They make me feel that maybe, just maybe, I might actually be making progress… until I realise that I still have ONE HUNDRED AND SIX FUCKING SQUARES still to make and I’ve only completed SIX GODDAMN PERCENT of my novel and that BOTH these targets completely and utterly FAIL to take into account that I STILL HAVE TO JOIN together those 256 squares and EDIT those 80-fucking-thousand words. It’s at this point that I calmly decide that my time would be much better spent crocheting everyone in the household ill-fitting fingerless gloves that they’ll lose within hours or never ever be seen dead wearing. You know it makes sense.