Allow me to remind myself (and you, dear reader), of my own foolishness. From Day 18’s update:

Morale: It was ebbing there for a while, until I realized now I only need to write about 6ish pages per day to reach the requisite 100, which shouldn’t be TOO hard since my final university exam for the year is over with tomorrow. (She said, naively, grossly underestimating the true magnetic pull of other distractions, like video games pursuing some good literature.)

To my credit(?), my optimism was couched by cynical foreshadowing. It turns out that the cynical foreshadowing has come to pass.

I should be ashamed of myself. Catavarie made the most of his time and has won the damn thing! I think it’s the old ‘people with free time get nothing accomplished’ phenomena (is there a better, more succinct name for that?). I believe it was in episode #17 of Dr. Ginger Campbell’s Books and Ideas Podcast where interviewee Mur Lafferty made some remarks on the difficulty of being a writer at home. Self-imposed deadlines are fairly deadly, and the spirit of the fair-game competition, Script Frenzy, apparently wasn’t enough of an external deadline to really, really motivate me.

I’m sure some of my zeal right out of the gate was fueled by the desperate, wild-eyed desire to just be writing anything other than essays and exams. I still like my original concept, but since I didn’t get a skeleton outline down before I began writing, I found it drifting, sometimes in directions I wasn’t pleased with. I’m not free-form enough for stuff like Script Frenzy and Nanowrimo, I think. I’m one of those anal retentive writers who has to basically write the whole damn thing before I sit down to write the whole damn thing.

I’m going to use this public shame at failing Script Frenzy to launchpad into the research stages of the SPP™.

In lieu of a triumphant page-count update, here are some things I have “accomplished” in recent memory:

All caught up in listening to You Look Nice Today.

Discovered BLDBLOG, via a link to their great interview with Daniel Dociu, a designer for Guild Wars.

My dark elf Inquisitor on EQII is now level 21. Or 22? My newly acquired secret vice has begun to grow, like a delicious and gratifying tumor.

And, today is, of course, the day that GTAIV comes out. I’m debating going to the midnight launch at my local EB Games. This is, after all, the first 10 that IGN.com has given a game in ages.

Whether you were being a productive writer, or being a productive loafer, I hope everyone had a grand weekend.