GAMES & THE RUINING OF BUDGETS

Running late this week, but here we go...

Working at a game distributor is dangerous to my budget. I get to see ALL the games that are available to buy. Being a big RPG fan, there’s a tidy selection of books about 15’ away from me that I can go drool over. Then there’s the board games which dominate the majority of the showroom floor. Our warehouse is a gamer’s dream stop if money was no object. Not everything is worth buying, but I could get close to picking up one of everything and never play them all. The final bit of enticement to spend money is toys; action figures, POPs, along with knickknacks and branded merchandise. And most of it moves quite well.

My work desk is by no means the most cluttered one in the office in terms of having figurines and other pop culture items. There’s a section devoted to Fallout [all hail the post-apocalypse] and I’ve got a red dragon mini on my computer, but there’s plenty of space to work. I do plan about 75% of my purchases in advance. As we get 3+ months of warning and publishers love to miss street dates, it’s easy to budget for it. There are impulse buys and those are items which slip under the radar. A co-worker gave me a bit of advice when I first started – Bills first, toys later. It requires discipline to work here at times and that bleeds over into writing.

I try to write every day if possible and set a goal of at least 1,000 words. Some days are better than others but I keep going. Yesterday was a bad for me and I had a lot of stress built up by the time I got home. My impulse was to make dinner, grab a beer, watch some videos or play a game, and then bed. It would’ve been so easy to do that. Instead, I decided to be an adult and take the hard road. I packed my laptop and headed out the door. Being a creature of habit, I plopped down at Starbucks, got my coffee, and began to pound out a scene for my novel. When I was done 90 minutes later, I had ~1,600 words and much less stress. Why?  Because I’d made progress on my novel and that made up for all the other crap that’d gone on earlier.

Then I went home, ate, did dishes [more adult stuff], chatted with some fellow writers, and then relaxed to watch videos. Did not get to bed early, but I felt a lot more accomplished when I finally did crawl between the sheets. Today’s a new challenge and I’m sure someone’s going to get on my nerves. And just like yesterday, I’m going to go home, get my laptop, and go write. Cause it’s what I do. It’s who I want to be, a disciplined writer.

Foot note – Cause my brain hates to settle on one thing, it just gave me an idea for a short story.