IT’S FOOT STUBBING TIME!

I’ve discovered the biggest boon to writers ever. A broken toe!

What’s the most difficult thing that writer’s face? It’s their own procrastination, I’m sure. Listen to ourselves: “Oh, I should sit down and write, oh, yes, I’ll sit right down and write after I scrub the bathroom, I’ll sit down and write after I make this call, I’ll sit down and write when the timer goes off, when the sun goes down, when the moon comes up.”

When hell freezes over could be more likely if procrastination has taken hold. I’ve spent whole days away from writing, doing anything else I could think of.

But, what if ones toe becomes broken (not on purpose, mind you, but because of an accident or even stupidity), and one is forced to sit down? (It doesn’t necessarily have to be through stupidity, I’m only writing from my own experience.) One does have to sit down a lot when something like that happens.

Of course there are many things you can do sitting down, you don’t have to write. You can read. Ah, but if you read. What happens then? When I’m reading a book that I genuinely enjoy, one that speaks to my genre, and has characters I can identify with, I drift away into an inward looking mode. The creative juices flow and the muses are tap, tap, tapping. I’m visiting my story, my plot and my characters in my mind. The book falls by the way/chairside, and I head over to my laptop. Now, of necessity, I must grab something nearby, hoist myself up and hobble off to my laptop, but the result is the same. Once seated I can get into the nitty-gritty of the problem that had banished me to procrastinationhood.

There was a sticky area in my cozy under revision (before I ran my flip-flopped bare toe into the wheel of the grocery cart), one that had driven me into a an outwardly delightful, but inwardly frustrating procrastination of several days duration. But because of the broken phalange I’ve been sitting more and reading more. I’ve been led into daydreams and back into a groove. I’ve beaten the inertia.

But, aren’t there less painful ways to achieve that desire to sit down and write?

Look on the bright side, oh ye of broken toe, six to eight weeks is a lot of revision and reading time.