Big Ed's Place“Blissful ignorance” and writing
This past week, I decided to conduct a “quality of life” experiment I dubbed “Blissful Ignorance.” From last Monday through the election, I would not check any news or sports websites, nor read the newspapers, nor watch TV news. I’d awoken to how I was so very pessimistic and cranky in my daily life and how much of that was due to my sense that the world’s going to hell. Now since this is a sex and writing site, I’ll skip the political rants and also skip whining about why sports was also bringing me down and just talk about how it’s going.
One week in, the biggest surprise for me is how much checking news or political sites was a habit. I’d read them over breakfast, a handful of times a day, and when I was in the process of procrastinating other stuff. Not doing it has created an unexpected void in my time. Admittedly, it’s not a big chunk of time–five minutes here, twenty minutes there–but it added up to more than I thought.
So some of that has been filled with writing. Despite only have two lunch hours to write this past week, I managed to finish the crappy first draft of TMI and do three editing passes. It stands at 2915 words. I need one more editing pass before I send it on to Nick for his review/edit. That will probably take a while since he has to get Ch18 of Summer Camp out first, but that’s okay by me.
I also completed the full scripts for pages 33-36 of Deep Dish. When I’ve been averaging 2-3 pages a week, to do a little more than that as well as the TMI work is quite heartening. This experiment may be worth it.
It may be worth it for other reasons. I’ve certainly been less cranky this past week. I don’t know if there will be a point where I will regret not knowing what’s going on in the world. I’ve certainly been disdainful of people who don’t follow the details enough to intelligently vote or otherwise participate in the political process, so the biggest discomfort so far has been the sense that I might be a hypocrite here. We’ll give it another couple of weeks to see if I can get over that.
[...] been harder to maintain my Blissful Ignorance this past week. The end of the week found me sliding into low energy due to the usual stresses and [...]