You want the truth? I haven't exactly been productive recently. Which is a problem, of course. It's also part of the job. The wrong part.

See, some people might throw up their hands and say "Writer's block!" and then run around the room screaming for a while until I got there to set them on fire. It's a freelance service I offer, by the way. Email me, and we can discuss rates.

Where was... right -- not working.

See, I have a bunch of stuff to write. A novella and about eight short stories. In a small space of time, even. I should be working on them. I should be thinking about them, coming up with plots and ideas and structures and all that good stuff. I'm not, though. I've been filling my nights with reading and listening to jazz and watching movies.

So if it isn't the dreaded "writer's block," what is it? Laziness, partly. Fuck, yeah it's laziness. My brain needed downtime. That happens once in a while, and I'll spend a week or two just sitting and only working on the things with deadlines that would be blown otherwise. Everything else just sits and looms large in the corner of my eye.

Kinda like Hasselhoff in a thong. You know he's there, but you're afraid that if you look, if you just give him that least little glance, he'll thrust his package in your face over and over until you call him Betty and beg to bear his misshapen children of lust.

Not that this is all laziness, though. Oh no, I said "partly," and I meant it, buckaroo. The rest of it? Well, that's simply me being overwhelmed.

Every few years I make a grand statement about how after another year, or a few months, I can take a break. I can slow down some and life will be easier. Then, when the deadline I marked out comes, things get crazier -- not saner. They pick up, and a new level of insanity is reached. After about a year of that level, I will find an endpoint to it and declare that in a few years or months the level will drop again.

This is, mind you, a good thing. The crazier I get, the more writing I am being asked to do. The more I am being asked to do, the better my chance at making this my only job.

Still, some part of my brain resents the extra crazy. So it stops production on a few things and refuses to engage. It drives me batshit. There's just no helping it. I don't, as I said, stop work on deadlines that sit close enough that my stalling would endanger them. I just ignore the stuff farther out for a while.

But I also know that soon I'll sit down and have an idea that burns in my head, and it will continue to burn until I write it. It will be the shape and size I need it to be, because I am lucky enough that I managed to train my headspace that way.

Then I'll be back in the game fully -- off and running.

These breaks used to scare me. They used to cause panic and calls that would start with, "I wonder if I've lost it." But I know that isn't true anymore. It just isn't. I got it; it's right there; and I'll poke it with a sharp enough stick any day now.

Just not today.

This is why it is best for me not to have your phone number. I'll call you, you see, if I do have it. And when I call, well, I'll regale you with these stories and plans and schemes of mine that will all be proven false by the time they come around.

I just always believe them when I say them.

It hurts no one. It lets me get the job done. It keeps Hasselhoff at bay.

Still, I will call and talk all about stories that are vastly different by the time I write them and projects that won't ever happen and plans for the next four years straight. All bullshit. At the time, though?

God's. Honest. Truth.

From my mouth to the Heavens and back again, completing some strange, off-center, Real Genius-type of space mirror laser guidance system vaporizing a guy in a chair while his butler's back is turned.

I had such a crush on Jordan when I was younger. Which is neither here, there, nor anywhere in between. I'm just putting it out there for you all.

So to sum up: I have a lot I have to write. I like Real Genius. I don't like Hasselhoff. Don't give me your phone number.

BONUS POSSUM FACT: Possums are marsupials, nocturnal, and omnivorous.

BONUS POSSUM STUPIDITY: Though Possum still do, in fact, "play possum" (referring to the Virginia Opossum, btw, which are sometimes called Possum, even though Possum are from Australia and New Guinea), they also haven't learned an important fact: Playing possum in response to oncoming traffic while trying to eat some road kill on a highway does not work.

And you thought I would forget the possum stuff, didn't you? Next time it'll be a different animal.