Procrastination, time-killing, and distractions have always been a battle with me.
I don’t spend hours playing Nintendo or Playstation, nor am I on my computer all the time playing Sid Meier’s Civilization. I do spend some time playing Top War and Royal Match on my mobile phone, and there is the odd session of Minecraft on my laptop as well. Then you have interesting videos on YouTube, as well as the odd news story every now and then.
So, I do get distracted sometimes – not as much as I used to as a kid, but I occasionally do. One of the things that I get distracted from doing is reading other people’s writing.
One of the biggest pieces of advice I learned from Daddy Stephen King was that if you want to be a writer, you have to both write a lot and read a lot. For a long time in my young adult years, I claimed that I was a writer but didn’t write down a single sentence of fiction or nonfiction that meant anything important to me. This blog that you are reading here was a big step towards me being an active and creative writer, and I feel like I haven’t yet reached my peak. It’s an exciting feeling.
As far as his advice regarding reading, I never needed any prompting to start that from anyone. My love of books and reading started from an early age and just kept building. I have built and rebuilt personal libraries that I’ve carted around from home to home, read through, boxed up again, and then eventually had to downsize due to space considerations.
The pace of my book reading has slowed down over the years, just from the simple fact that having less time than I used to, first with my career, and then with family, although I’m always reading. However, again with the limited space that I have for storing books, never mind storing them where they are within close reach, I have had to carefully ration any new acquisitions[1].
Ever since I have joined Substack, however, I’ve had another, similar situation. I have connected my Substack to my email that I am using for my writing. Every day, I get dozens of emails from all of the writers I have subscribed to so far on that platform.
For a while, I felt guilty not checking all of them out immediately. I mean, I’m planning on eventually asking people to pay to subscribe to read my work. But that is a lot of writing to sort through. I just have to be patient and get through what I can in the time that I have. It turns out that there’s some pretty good writing out there. I’ll get to it eventually.
Footnotes:
- Yes, I realize that there is such a thing as e-books. I have purchased a few of those, most notably the first book in the Wheel of Time series, but I don’t think they are going to ever replace physical books in my mind. It is tougher to cart them around with me, but they don’t ever run low on batteries.
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