Travel Sucks

For the last week and a half I’ve been playing a little game, hiding from my Minders when they come to deliver food and other supplies. In the past I was handcuffed to the toilet whenever they came into the room, so I just started to hide from them. I also stopped bathing or engaging in any other kind of personal hygiene.

This morning they came for me, handcuffed me to the toilet, and forcibly shaved me.

Apparently I need to be spruced up a bit for public consumption, as Big Things are going to happen concerning The Electric Church, and since I might actually be viewed by the reading public at some point it was thought I should resemble Grizzly Adams a little less. And smell a little better, if at all possible.

I haven’t posted much because I’ve been travelling. Travel, as anyone who knows me already knows, is on my list of things to never do unless forced by a higher power–usually my surprisingly strong wife. A few months ago she decided she wanted to go somewhere for her birthday, so Las Vegas there we went.

It was hot. Triple digit hot. I don’t mean to whine about it; we’re Northeastern folks and we walk everywhere. We walked out to the “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” sign and I think I lost fifteen pounds or so just getting there. I mean, it was hot.

Plus, I have a bunch of writing projects on the griddle, and lost a week on all of them. The TEC sequel, the new issue of TIS, a few odds and ends–the trip seriously ate into my work schedule. Sitting on the plane for four hours before we even took off on the flight home didn’t help, either–it’s a 4 hour flight and my laptop battery goes about 3 hours, so I dared not turn it on lest I be without MP3s the whole flight, which leads to madness.

Ah, but now I am back. Which means. . .nothing, really. The Day Job starts sucking my time immediately and I am never one to just dive in and start working. I need Waste Time. This sometimes appears to be singular to me, this need to just waste two hours for every one I work. I need to surf the Intarwebs, play video games, read from the 6 books I’ve started–that sort of thing–for a while before I can relax and get into my writing costume. Which is really just a big chicken costume, but I call it my writing costume. Tell no one. It’s too embarrassing. If it took you twenty minutes just to get into your writing costume (thirty if I’m sweaty) you’d put it off as much as you could too.

Now, it’s “Welcome back to the land of the living. . .now pick up a shovel and get to work!”