JFDI

I should be JFDI but, I don’t know, something’s missing.

Some small piece of motivational ‘oomph’ seems to have fallen out of my psyche and is probably hidden under the couch, where I have spent so much time this weekend.

So instead of writing the outline for that killer final episode of Shelved and re-editing what’s been written, I’m sitting at the dining table previewing music for future podcasts.

I don’t know if I’m suffering from the usual trap that all writers fall in to – auto, auto-generated, inverted, self-procrastination – or if this one has been brought on by the irritating but relatively minor laptop crash that happened earlier this week.

Yes, the crash did cause me to lose some data. Two files, to be precise. And the loss of one file didn’t matter, whilst the other can be easily reconstructed with about 90 minutes effort.

But it’s the thought of that reconstruction, those long lost 90 minutes, that seems to be stopping me from getting up, applying the JFDI and finishing the job in hand.

I have a 1,500-word feature to write – correction, I should have delivered a 1,500-word feature *last weekend* but, you know…

This is not me. This is bollocks.

Normally if I’ve got a target I’m (to mix metaphors with mad abandon) up and at it like a rat up a nun’s drainpipe.

Whatever.

But the key structural component in my writing is missing *from* my writing; it’s not missing from anything else in my life, just absent from my writing.

And the name of the missing part?

Humour.

For some unknown reason I can’t write the funnies at the moment.

There’s plenty of fun, and funnies, in my life; I just can’t work it out in to this one aspect of my work.

That’s a bit rubbish really, especially as the big piece of writing is the aforementioned sitcom.

Do people still say ‘aforementioned’?

Has the writing part of my brain fallen in to a wormhole and is now bobbing about in some period costume drama of an alternate reality?

Well, has it, Mr Darcy?

Oh hell, there’s no hope.