Living with ADD isn’t easy and being a writer and living
with ADD can be the pits. I think my life would be a whole lot easier if I didn’t
have to deal with ADD.
More than once this last week I caught myself getting
distracted from what I was doing each time I took a break to use the facilities
or get more water. At some point or other I would notice something that needed
done, or remember something I was going to do, and, instead of a couple minutes
away from my computer I’d be more like twenty or longer, i.e. long enough the
thing went to sleep.
But if that weren’t bad enough, I couldn’t concentrate on
one manuscript! I’d get thinking about changes I needed to make on my science
fiction series and open it up only to have my brain switch gears to one of two other
incomplete novels I have and some changes or additions I need to make to them.
Except if I opened either of those, my brain would switch back to the sci-fi.
In other words, I never got much of anything done even
though my brain was actively working on my various stories – I doubt anyone
could write about A and B when their brain was thinking about X and Y. I
personally found it disconcerting when I had the story about A and B open, and
suddenly my brain had the story about X and Y running through my thoughts and I
very nearly inserted the new details for X and Y’s story into A and B’s story,
which would have been more than a little weird since one is sci-fi and the
other a contemporary romance.
And adding to my problems with concentrating on just one
story was my problems with sticking to just one task until I was done. More
than once I caught myself stopping in the middle of the room, on my way back
from the bathroom, trying to remember what I was going to do next, and when I
did remember something to do, I’d start doing it and suddenly remember what I’d
been doing before I got up, either that or I’d go back to what I’d been doing and I'd suddenly remember that I had something else I was going to do before I got back
to it.
More than once it was my empty stomach or water bottle which
finally reminded what I was going to do before returning to my computer.
None of which helped me because while I realized all sorts
of tweaks that needed done to three different manuscripts this past week, I didn’t
get a whole lot done toward actually executing any of those changes.
On the other hand, Konnie actually managed to get some
writing done this last week either, more than I did anyway, which for her is an
improvement, but let’s face it, her life is so much busier than mine, which is
why she’s usually the one who doesn’t get a lot of writing done in a week.
Time zone wise I’m an hour earlier than Konnie is, but she
beats me up every morning, because she’s up before the crack of dawn, whereas I
sleep in. Typically, when most people are heading out the door for the day, I’m
just crawling out of bed, while Konnie was heading out the door around the time
most people are getting up in the morning, and she’s constantly busy from the moment
she gets up in the morning until she finally shuts off her computer and goes to
sleep each night.
I spend the majority of my time around the house, with the
only noise being when I turn on the TV or the stereo. At Konnie’s house, noise
erupts anytime someone so much as walks past the house. With, I think the
current count is five, dogs I have a tendency to cut phone calls with my
sister short because that pack started barking again.
Konnie on the other hand lives in that racket, and lives
with her family, so there is always something going on, and always people talking
or doing something, and it only gets quiet around there after like eleven o’clock
at night, but their mornings start around four-thirty or five. And she not only
works in all that chaos, she’s in charge of it!
So, while I don’t get a lot of writing done because my brain
won’t focus on one project she doesn’t get a lot of writing done because her
family requires so much of her attention.
As kids, living together, our lives were very similar, but
things changed because we now live such different lives as adults.
Happy writing everyone. 😊
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