I know I talk a lot about getting in “the flow,” this locked-in state of mind where I’m typing faster than a speeding bullet and able to polish off an entire blog post in a single cup of coffee. Yeah, I miss that. Lately, my brain is less like a flowing river of words and more like a machine gun duct-taped to a shopping cart. Sure, it’s technically powerful, but it’s just spraying everywhere as it swerves for the beer aisle. (Don’t @ me, gun guys, I know that’s not how machine guns or shopping carts work, but welcome to my neurology.)

For the record, this is not writer’s block. Writer’s block is for people on WriterThreads who moan about their characters abandoning them because the moon is in the wrong house or the tea is the wrong temperature. I never suffer from that. In a sense, I have the opposite problem. I have too many ideas. I’m drowning in ideas. My fingers, however, refuse to pick one and make a commitment.

Right now, I can show you:

  • Multiple outlines for the intricate heist in The Halferne Deception, complete with plot hole identification and remediation
  • Fifteen pages of dialogue between characters who, small detail, aren’t even in that book
  • An entire napkin of joke article ideas to hopefully finish off the first draft of The Pessimal Refrain (my comedy rockumentary) in the next few weeks.
  • A OneNote file listing twenty ideas and outlines for blog posts
  • The Terraform script to build a VPN gateway and connect to the on-prem ExpressRoute circuit … wait, how’d that get in there?

So, what’s the problem? Well, the problem is I referenced the Venom Mob in a post last weekend, which triggered something in my brain that makes a little voice go “Taco Bell Crave Case,” which is my go-to guilty pleasure food for binge-watching old chop-socky flicks. Yes, guess who’s been having a Gordon Liu marathon all week when they should have been writing.

On a more productive note, you will notice that this blog now has a new home, perichore.com. I decided this was prudent after the Sunday writer group kept asking me for my blog address and realizing there’s something to a simple catchy name instead of “d-j-a-y … got it … s-n-i … no not s-n-y … it’s Scotch/Irish, not German/Dutch …” Giving my blog address probably shouldn’t be like explaining my ancestry to a disinterested clerk on Ellis Island, so I bought another domain. (Yes, another. Don’t check my credit card bill.) Now all my writing will live here, while lungbarrow.com becomes the umbrella gateway pointing to sites for my other personalities: musician, tech nerd, literateur, podcaster, as well as links to the socials I’m still active on and the myriad joke websites I’ve built over the years because it seemed like a good idea once over Saturday morning coffee.

I will admit, I’m starting to warm up to this whole PaaS WordPress thing. After years of hand-coding ASP.NET on IIS, drag-and-drop web editors feel like cheating, but the kind of cheating that gets you an A without detention. I may end up shutting down my server and migrating all of my web presence here, because, let’s be real, nobody is ever going to pay me to invent cool web apps again in the age of drag-and-drop, zero-code solutions. Keeping the chops up was a noble pursuit, but now it seems eccentric, like I’m grabbing my pipe and slippers before sitting down to read the newspaper. See how bad I am? I just invented yet another major project idea in the middle of blogging about how I have lost all productivity because I have too many project ideas.

Fortunately, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. The powers that be at work are steadfast about my burning some of the 240 hours of vacation I’m hoarding, so I’ve got a mini vacation coming up early next month, then a full week off in November for NaNoWriMo. I plan to either sit in a quiet cabin in the woods, hammering out this heist sequence like the training montage in Invincible Shaolin, or I’ll be at the bar in a casino resort, furiously typing between bouts of questionable decision-making. (Current rules: one $10 spin of roulette every time the word “red” or “black” comes up in the text, one round of craps after every completed scene, and one shoe of blackjack after every chapter. If I come out ahead, I’ll write a book promoting this as a writer’s guide and sure-win gambling system.)

I’d like to say distraction is a curse, but honestly, it’s probably the only reason I get anything written at all. Without it, I’d have one tidy manuscript instead of a dozen half-crafted novels, four blog drafts, and ideas for two new podcasts and a YouTube channel. Come to think of it, maybe I should spend my vacation organizing my OneNote notebook, because that seems a bit light. I’m sure there was more than that I was working on.

So the next time your brain is a machine gun, don’t bother aiming. Just pull the trigger, let the words scatter across the battlefield, and hope you don’t hit your day job in the process. If Halferne Deception and Pessimal Refrain aren’t drafted by the end of NaNo, then at least I’ll have something to show for it, even if it’s just monk-like focus earned in a cabin, or a very detailed buffet review written on casino stationery.