Friday, August 10, 2012

Not so productive.

Short and sweet, writing last night, today, and tonight has been dismal.  I'm having trouble staying focused and actually getting anything done.  I've done some edits and updates, written ~600 words about a bajillion times and then promptly deleted them, and generally done a lot of sighing.

I've put in about 5 hours dedicated writing time today and my overall word count is up about 200 words.  For a while there it was actually down a bit.

I'll be putting in some more time this weekend, as I've been trying to do every day (and succeeding most of them), I just need to kick this funk.

The explanation is after the jump, if you're tired of hearing me talk about things other than writing, this post ends here.




Bear with me.  Prince went back to the shelter yesterday, and me, being the big suck that I am (admittedly and wholeheartedly), well, I've been pretty down about it.

He went snarly snappy bananas at me a few times, and at my wife once or twice, in what a dog behaviourist and a separate trainer called "redirected aggression".  When asked what we could do to correct the issue, they suggested seeking professional help and keeping him separated from our kids and cats.  They said the process of working out the root cause and correcting it would most likely take months.

For the safety of my children, and because Prince needs someone better equipped to help him, he's gone back to the shelter, where they're arranging to transfer him to a training and rescue organization where they can focus on his redirected aggression and help him be ready for a forever home.

Some of you who know me personally probably understand how much giving him up has hurt me.  Sure we only had him in our home for 8 days, but in the process of training him and spending dedicated time with him, I couldn't help but bond with him.  Still, you'd think having Prince snarl, growl, and lunge at various parts of my body, teeth bared and snapping would temper some of that, but I can't help but feel that the failure and fault lies with me, at least some of it.

In the 8 days he was here, he learned to walk nicely on a leash, make eye contact on command, sit, lie down (most of the time), come (most of the time), and leave it (some of the time).  He learned to stay out of the kitchen during mealtimes and not beg, and would lay near our other dog just outside the door while we ate.

Despite being told that he had a serious aggression issue with cats, it turned out he was actually quite frightened by them and would back away and cower when Mal approached or stood in a doorway (which was never planned, we had a slow introduction strategy we were keeping with, but Mal is a tricky cat and his curiosity about the new addition could not be sated fast enough).

He's so intelligent, and most of the time so gentle and simply lovely to be with that it hurt all of us to bring him back.  But when it comes to my family, I have to put safety and reason ahead of emotion.  Unfortunately, that doesn't make it hurt much less.

So I've taken to trying to work through it and keep myself distracted.  I ran 7.5KM last night, getting faster as I went, setting both new speed records for myself and a new distance record (I normally stop at 5KM as a rule, it's just supposed to be my cardio, I'm not working towards a half-marathon or anything).

Today I dug into distractions as much as I could:  Doing more research for my books (both of them this time) and working on some things for my eldest daughter's hockey team, and constantly throwing away writing work that just felt broken and kept going off in the wrong direction.

Throughout both days I've thrown myself at Mal and Sadie to the point where I think Sadie might actually be avoiding me and Mal won't leave me alone.

I also stuffed myself full of rich chocolate confections, which felt like a good idea at the time, less so now.

Anyway, my apologies for spilling all that here, but that's part of what this blog is about, my dreams and aspirations of becoming a professional writer and all the things that help and hinder them (admittedly, most of it is self-inflicted).

I'll be digging more into the writing side of things again shortly.

I think I have some chocolate cheesecake in the fridge that I haven't eaten...

-Grimm

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