Today – okay, let’s be honest here – the past two weeks I have done a truly masterful job of avoiding the rewrite on my novel. Everything from the grocery store to the dust bunnies under the couch clamored for attention. Throw in the adoption of a new puppy and relatives popping in and out of Hotel Hughes as they toured the great state of Arizona, and voila.  Word count: zero.

The correct response to all of the aforementioned diversions would have been to barricade myself in a closet, let hubby handle both the potty-challenged puppy and chatty houseguests, and get at least an hour of writing done.

But instead – like any good procrastinator – I dutifully responded to each and every distraction until the days vaporized.  One after the other.

And I felt like crap.

But rationalization is also a specialty of mine. So, I told myself that I was in the throes of writer’s block. And if I can’t write, then why not do something else productive? Like maybe reading about the writing I was supposed to be doing.

So, I grabbed my copy of “The War of Art” by Steven Pressfield, and opened it right up to this:

“It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.”

I don’t have writer’s block at all. I have “sitter’s block.” And the only way I can resist Resistance is to do what I say twenty times a day to my two beloved dogs:

Sit.

Stay.

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Peggy Sue                                                                                                      Sugar Ray (aka, “the new kid”)