Like a parasite boring into your skull: Wednesday Word Tangle

Image: Pixabay

The rain is sheeting down – truly, if I stepped outside right now, it would be like walking into a curtain of water.

Pants-wet through in moments.

It’s putting me off my writing stride, all this plink-plonk, black skies, hardly able to see my own hands over the keyboard weather. Or so I tell myself.

Really, it’s just another excuse to keep me from doing some proper work.

You see, I’m waiting on decisions on a couple of projects – a serial competition for a magazine, and most brown-trouserish of all, the word back from a publisher about a novel I submitted.

This waiting – though expected, though normal – is like having a parasite bore into the back of your skull and scratch at your brain with its mandibles day after day. It’s sending me slightly daffy.

I keep checking my inbox – though not my phone, no one rings you these days – and rechecking and refreshing. I scan forums like some manic treasure hunter wearing their fingures to stumps, searching for a glimmer of gold in the dust.

What I should do, what I’d tell anyone else to do if I was pontificating on the writerly process, is get stuck into a new project, launch myself into new writing that will hold my attention.

But the internet calls me back like a virtual bouyancy aid, making it impossible to drown in my own words, instead making me swallow huge gulps of other peoples’.

The Latin origins of

DISTRACTION

– today’s Wednesday Word Tangle – is DISTRACTIO which is surely the spell Ron Weasley cast on Hermione, to stop her realising Harry was the better bet.

Anyway, it’s cast its spell on me. The only answer is to turn of the internet, so …

***

Thanks go to the lovely Kat for kicking off W4W. May she live long and prosper 🙂