1. Wake up a little late, and don’t get to anything productive until something past 8:30. This is actually a great way to not write.
2. Start by focusing on something actually important that is not focused on creating words. Like tax preparation. This is what I did today, and it quite easily ate up 45 minutes of time I could have been writing.
3. Once that is done, decide that your filing system is terrible. Yes, all your files are spread out over three computers, and a backup hard drive, and the cloud. Yes, you needed to rethink the way you’re working, and yes, the two hours or more that you spent getting things arranged on your work computer will actually pay off pretty well in the end. The fact that no words were created in those two hours is merely a happy side effect.
4. Stop for lunch. While eating lunch, decide to play around with Paint.net.
5. While playing with Paint.net, decide that you really should use a live project as the trial material, so spend two hours creating the concept cover for the short story you’re planning to launch in a couple weeks. This is a remarkably good writing leak, because you can explain away the fact that you haven’t created any words with the idea that you’re doing production.
6. Go to the grocery.
7. Notice that Ritter’s is open, stop for a medium glacier. Yum. Okay, this is actually necessary.
8. Return home and spend more time refining the concept of your short story cover. This is an insidious leak, because you know damned well what happened. Your brain has been turning over the things you learned in your earlier stint, and it’s basically as hooked as a crack addict. There was just really no way it was going to go write after an hour plus of thinking about all the issues with that cover.
9. Make dinner. Okay, this is actually necessary.
10. During dinner, watch Louisville play basketball. Okay, this was necessary, and Jebus, man, that alley oop dunk from Rozier to Harrell was amazing!
11. Write a blog entry that describes all the ways a writer can go an entire day and not create a word.