Burning Out?

My “weekend” is Wednesday and Thursday. Tuesday night at work (I work the 3 to 11 shift) I was all full of plans and energy to tackle the never shrinking “To Do” list. (It seems to hover around 45 items.)  I was going to start at the top of my list and just cross things off until I got to the bottom.

But that was Tuesday night.

Wednesday morning I woke up and all that energy was nowhere to be found.

Not too unusual, really.  My job can be stressful (I’m a nurse in a long term care facility) and my first day off usually is pretty much a waste; I’m tired, I’m sore, and I’m drained both emotionally and mentally.

So I spent most of Wednesday staring at my computer, poking at stuff on Face Book, trying to ignore the Word docs that I’d opened in the hopes of making myself do something useful, and doing way too many puzzles on Jig Zone.  (It’s “too many puzzles” when your hand and wrist hurt from using the mouse and your eyes can no longer distinguish subtle differences in color, such as between brown and blue.)

Ah, well.  Thursday is a new day, right?

Thursday was only slightly more productive than Wednesday.  I got the rat cage cleaned and its shelves washed, cleaned the bathtub, and took out a bag of garbage. I also started looking for recipes for dog treats and got overwhelmed by the sheer volume of them, so that project got put on hold.

And my other projects? They never got started.

I have a goal to add 9000 words to the sequel to Song and Sword this month and I never even opened that Word doc.

For one thing, I’m at a scene where I’m kind of stuck and am having trouble working through it.  I’m not sure where it’s going and it’s kind of… dull.  (Which means it will be dull and boring for a reader, too, so I need to either cut it or spice it up, but I’m not sure which so it’s going to stay until I find out what happens in it (it’s not in the outline) and then go for there because something important might be lurking in it.

But meantime, I still have to get through it.  (I think it might be time to go to Write or Die to plow through this bit because I really want to have this finished before November.)

I think maybe I’m burned out, both at work and at writing.  The problem is, taking time out from writing is counter-productive: it doesn’t refresh me, it just makes it harder to get started again.

So maybe it’s time to take a break from this particular project and go work on something else for a bit so I can come back to it with a fresh mindset. I won’t be making progress on the Elven Bard novel (but then, how much progress am I making when I am so resistant to working on it?) but at least I’ll be writing something.

But what to work on…?