You would think that, since I don’t have a day job or kids at home, I’d be able to get lots of writing done, wouldn’t you? Yet here I am, turning out maybe fifteen-twenty pages in a good week. So what do I do with my time?

Well, eating, sleeping, housekeeping, web-surfing — all the obvious stuff. But I manage to find some more eccentric ways to put off work, as well.

Right now, for example, I’m in the middle of carefully editing a digital transfer of the Moody Blues’ “Seventh Sojourn” from LP to iTunes. This is an album I haven’t played in four or five years, but it suddenly seemed urgent to get it archived on my computer.

And I just wrote a letter to a bank to let them know that the guy they’re looking for at this address hasn’t lived here for at least five years. Anyone sensible would have just tossed their letter, instead of answering it.

Earlier I spent some time identifying a coverless old book I inherited, which turns out to be A.D. 2000, by Lieutenant Alvarado M. Fuller, published in 1890 — while I knew the title, the author’s name does not appear anywhere after the title page, which is missing from my copy. Now I’ve not only identified it, but was able to print out scans of the pages I was missing. Which was entertaining, but not very useful.

I also sorted a bunch of old manuscripts as part of an ongoing effort to tidy my office. This had me happily contemplating questions such as, “Do comic book scripts go with novels or short stories?” “Do I need to keep all the drafts of short stories?” “Did I really do that many rewrites of my scripts for Tekno*Comix? Well, at least they’re all dated, and therefore easy to sort.”

And of course, I’m writing this blog entry, instead of something that might make money.

So now you know why I’m still only a paragraph into Chapter Seven of The Sorcerer’s Widow.