As I’m writing this, I should be boarding a plane home from vacation. Should. What I’m doing instead, what I’ve been doing all week, is working.

I mean, there are worse things, sure, and our reasons for delaying this vacation until the end of the year were solid. Still, it hurts.

Like, I should be somewhat tanned, slightly rested, and maybe a little ready (for what, I have no idea). Instead, I’m four days into one of the busiest weeks I can remember. Four days in and the next three weeks will be even busier.

Listen: I’m bad at vacations. Partly that’s because I’ve got weird dietary issues. Partly that’s because, well, because I work really hard to make my home somewhere I want to be. Leaving it when I’ve got time off always feels a bit silly.

But! But, travel is good, right? Sure, sure. Wait, that sounded condescending. Yes, travel is good. Personally, I’d like to spend some time in the American Southwest, in California and Seattle; I’d like to take a cruise. I’d like to bounce around Europe for a bit.

I would like to travel, it’s just that travel often feels like more trouble than it’s worth. What I’d like to do is fill a backpack and vanish for a couple weeks. I mean, it sounds great, right? In practice . . . less so.

I mean, boo hoo, poor guy who can, ostensibly, afford to travel, doesn’t get to. What is the world coming to?

But the bigger point, I think, is this: if we had gone away this week, I would have spent almost the entire week working in the hotel. Today is Thursday and, no joke, I’ve spent twelve to sixteen hours, easily, each day this week in front of my computer, working.

Not writing — working.

Writing is a whole other issue. When I’m working on a book — which is always — I work every night. Some nights that doesn’t happen, but working, writing, that’s my default. If I don’t, there’s a reason for it. Sometimes, it’s even a good reason.

On vacation, I’d have my laptop or a tablet, and I’d sure mean to spend an hour tap tap tapping away on my keyboard. The last time I took a vacation (this was December of 2017, if anyone’s keeping track), I had my manuscript in tow, but it didn’t get much red ink on it that week. Vacationing is tiring, and busy, and it’s not really conducive, in my experience, to the place a novelist goes when they’re noveling.

Yeah, yeah, suck it up, you say. And, you’re right! Still, the point of taking a break is, well, taking a break. And as much as I enjoy writing and even editing (side note: that’s not a joke, I really do enjoy editing. I feel I may be alone in this), it’s rough telling the family, Okay, see you in two hours, I’m going to go do some writing in the lobby.

Like, if you’re on vacation, be on vacation. Or don’t. The gears don’t stop turning, after all. One thing I do try and do, if I’ve got a trip coming up, is to make sure I’m at a good stopping point in whatever I’m doing. In 2017, I think I finished whatever draft I was on the book I was writing about a week before the trip. That was on purpose. I rewrote a lot of the last 1/4 of the book, but at least I wasn’t thinking about writing that while I was on the beach.

Writing is one of those jobs that doesn’t have days off. My other job is like that, too. Mush the two together and, well, you really have to steal your moments. That’s just what I try to do — mostly I fail, but sometimes I surprise myself.

My ideal vacation? Probably someplace warm but not hot, cool, but not cold. Someplace I can see the sites, but not feel overwhelmed by all there is to say. Honestly, what I’d like to do is go away for a month or two and actually get to experience a place beyond that week of travel / unpack / do as much as you can / pack / travel.

Maybe someday.

Here’s a thing I used to do, that I’ll be doing again: telling you a little about a useful writing tool that I use in my day-to-day life.

I try to write every day. Well, technically, every night (daytime is busy busy busy). If you, as a person who exists in the same physical universe as me, and under the constraints of linear time, is probably aware, sometimes it can be damned hard to focus.

Like, sit down at your computer. Words don’t immediately begin to flow? Check Twitter. Browse your tabs. Oh, wait, what time is it? Crap. Well, you can always finish that chapter tomorrow.

But.

But what if you could turn off your internet for an hour or two? No, you don’t have to tick off the family by unplugging your router, you just have to install Freedom.

What’s it do? Just what the label says. Start a session, tell it how long to go for, and you’re free to work distraction-free until the session ends.

It’s great. No, it’s the best.

Now, you can use it just like that — start a session, write, go back online — or you can work with some high-end features. You can install it on your phone. Your tablet. You can schedule sessions ahead of time. You can single-out certain apps to work and others to be offline.

Yeah, it’s fantastic.

So: Freedom. Great writing tool. If you’ve never heard of it, now you have. And if you’re reading this when you should be writing, maybe download it and give it a try.

I’m bad at social media.

I quit Facebook about two months ago. I don’t post often on Twitter (and when I do, it’s usually to push an article I read somewhere. Blogging? For a while, you’d see stories about how blogging is dead, even though some are claiming it’s making a comeback.

My problem is a combination of time and bandwidth.

Time: there simply aren’t enough hours in the day. Which is to say, there aren’t enough minutes in the day in between the stuff I need to do. My job — my day job — has a kind of routine that’ll make you want to claw your eyes out. It’s a sine curve of activity that shifts between rushing to get stuff out and waving my hands at the screen, urging people to respond to the stuff I got out.

Bandwidth: I should be writing right now. Technically, of course, I am, but what I mean is, I should be working on my book right now. And — hey — I was, earlier. I finished off a chapter! It went really well! But now I need to start the next chapter, and I figured I’d give myself a scoop of mental sorbet to bridge the gap.

There aren’t a lot of gaps in my day. And when I’m writing, I want to be, you know, writing. Books don’t write themselves, you know?

Still, I used to be better at this. Is there a trick to it? Discipline? Planning out the week’s posts, the month’s posts, in advance?

Maybe.

Time was, I had an actual blogging schedule. Hell, time was, I’d blog every single night when I finished writing. That was nice, posting my word count. It kept me honest. Don’t feel like writing? Well, you’ve got to post that word count, so get to it.

But the thing is, when I stopped blogging, I kept writing. This isn’t much of a revelation, as far as revelations go, but there you have it.

I don’t think I’ll bother with word counts here. Not yet, at least. I probably won’t write much about what I’m writing — part of the reason I stopped doing this in the first place was because it felt repetitive. Like, the chapter I finished tonight surprised the hell out of me. Two of the characters went to a place that felt really natural, and really powerful.

But writing about that . . . it’s sort of dull. I mean, you don’t want to spoil the story, right? And without the spoilers, it’s just me telling you about pretend people you don’t know, doing stuff you have no context for. So maybe none of that.

What will this be about, then?

Well, whatever. I’m going to start soliciting agents, soon (for a different book). Depending on how that goes, it could be worth sharing. And, if that moves on to the next step, and the next step, well, I figure I’ve got plenty to learn, and some of that’ll be worth sharing, too. There are plenty of mes out there, folks giving it a shot and seeing where it goes.

So, let’s see where it goes. First post down. More to come.