Last week in a post titled I Paused My Game to Be Here, I delved into the Great Distractor, which I essentially named as the incredible, immersive stories and adventures to be found in the modern videogame. This is true. Anyone who’s sunk a hundred or more hours in unravelling the threads woven into Skyrim, Fallout 4, or the Baldur’s Gate series needs no convincing. You know of what I speak.
But I have another distraction that I try not to bring to the table because it is a private issue and I hate to fall back on those, but here we are. I mentioned briefly my wife’s recent knee surgery and her relapse and return to the hospital. She is back home and progressing slowly, and I see no long-term debilitating issues in her future, but she is the other distraction, or to be accurate, everything else is a distraction from her. She needs things done for her and brought to her on a fairly frequent basis, and much of that falls to me.
The interruptions are frequent, breaking my train of thought, and when I see a chunk of time looming ahead and need a quick decision on what to do, I usually find myself discouraged by the circumstances and mentally frazzled, and my natural tendency is to turn to adventure in the form of the aforementioned games… the Distractions. They challenge my decision-making skills, provide otherwise unavailable puzzles and mysteries to solve, and for a little while, I’m 27 again, vibrant, a force for good in the world instead of a worn out old man of 77 who can barely get around himself, and often forgets what he came into a room for before he reaches the shelf, table, or wherever he thought he was going. I need it.
Somewhere in this mix is writing. It’s rare that I feel the urge to get out the materials and try to drive a story. I have a follow-up to The Breakdown (found on the Flashes page) in progress, but I have of late been too mentally exhausted to push it forward. And when I do feel like writing, which is rare, it seems that I’m always compelled to put together a post for this blog. I don’t “feel like” writing near enough to even keep this up to date, so it has become a distraction that I feel must go. But I won’t do a panic deletion; my snap decisions rarely work out well. I will give it two weeks. We’re assured that Bonnie’s recovery should be well underway by then, and if that’s the case I should have considerably larger chunks of uninterrupted time going forward. If this still remains a distraction, however, I will have to let it go.
Should that be the case, I want to give you a couple of places where you can read my work. My long-established Writing.com page will be a library of my stories. I will need some time to get over there and open up the stories so that non-members can read them, but I’ll be doing that soon. The link is:
http://writing.com/authors/holttaylor
I go by the name of “Phantom Reviewer” there, so if that’s the name at the top of the page, you’ve found me.
I am also the admin and occasional contributor to a dark literature consortium that goes by the name Threads that Bind. I only have to come up with a post once every ten weeks there, so that’s manageable. It’s there you’ll find me (and a group of authors far more knowledgeable than I) dispensing wisdom on the Craft:
Two weeks from now, all this may be forgotten in the wake, but in case it isn’t, hang on to those links. They’ll open worlds for you far broader than this one! I hope to see you again wherever I land. Friendships make it all worth doing.
Flights of Fancy 
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