Guilty Pleasures (That Keep Me From Writing)

A Post By Jonathan

We all have them. We all want to get rid of them. But no matter how hard we try, they never seem to go away. They are our guilty pleasures-- and they're here to stay.

We writers are naturally guilty people anyway, so when we're working on a book or article it's tough to view any other activity (besides writing) as okay or something we can feel good about. I'm not talking about family commitments, the day job or other essentials of being a functioning adult. I'm talking about those conscious decisions we make, in our (for some rare) moments of free time, to spend (waste?) hours and hours doing something that is easy and requires no thinking and just makes us happy, OK?!

Anyway, here are my top three guilty pleasures and how they keep me from writing:

Oh come on, I know you watch it too. Sure, it's only an hour show on a Sunday night, but most of the episodes are so awesome that you just have to spend a couple days on the internet figuring out what you missed, and on twitter gleaning everyone's reaction, and watching the after show show episodes (and the after the after the show show episodes).

So maybe GoT is more than one guilty pleasure... But it pretty much takes up my whole Sunday night (but I've read the books, that's got to count for something, right?) My Sunday nights will get even more guilty with the arrival of this next one.

This may not resonate with a lot of my fellow writers, but I love, love, love NFL football. It's not just the games, but I play fantasy football as well (probably way too much of it). I've been meaning to quit my league(s) for about ten years now, but I keep lying to myself that it's the only way I stay in touch with my buddies. I mean, what kind of buddies can they be if we only commune online over a fake game with fake players for four months out of the year?

Well when you're a dude this can sometimes be the only way you stay in touch. It's so fun and so easy to waste time on, reading articles, stats, etc. Apparently fantasy football costs companies 13.4 billion dollars a year in lost revenue due to workers spending time on it. Sorry boss!

Oh Netflix. You dirty little time sucker. How you waste my life with your amazing original series and ease of viewing with your no commercials and enticing streaming of many seasons of the most obscure shows on the world wide web. I really loved that Manga black hole you dragged me down the other night. Even though that cartoon was entirely in Japanese I'm pretty sure I got the gist. Don't mess with the Japanese... If only writing were so easy. I could just sit on the couch with my potato chips and let the ideas wash out of me and flow from my fingers and onto my laptop. Ain't so and will never be so.

So here's a PSA for you kids. Don't be me. Don't do Game of Thrones or Fantasy Football or Netflix or Drugs. Just keep your nose to the grindstone and keep on the keepin' on. That said, feel free to celebrate with any of your guilty pleasures once you've put the time in or completed a project. They won't feel nearly so guilty if you actually deserve them.

Now if you ever want to talk about a series or know of another fantasy league I can get into, just leave a note at the bottom! And thanks for stopping by.