The very beginning of February started out mildly hopeful, although pretty unproductive. Things quickly deteriorated from there. Without meaning to, I ended up taking a hiatus from writing and just about everything else I meant to do.

I blame it mostly on the weather. Blizzards piling on top of each other had such a strong effect on life in Boston this month that productivity suffered in all areas. I work from home, and so I didn’t have to go out in it or try to grapple with the sad public transportation more than a few times, but it seems to me that the energy of the city is frustrated and exhausted, which didn’t help me to feel more motivated. There were also a few social distractions, but that took a much smaller percentage of time than complaining about the weather did.

There was also the somewhat significant matter of not knowing what to write. When I hit a point in the story I had been writing where it just did not want to go any further, and I decided to take a break from it, I didn’t have another project lined up to work on instead. That, I guess, was a mistake. The few times I really made an effort to figure out what I wanted to do, I got nowhere. The creative juices are not flowing.

(Ever think about how weird that phrase is? It’s so weird. I don’t think people should say it anymore.)

As for the writing challenge, which I still intend to complete, I’m now about 30,000 words behind because of my lack of productivity. One thousand words a day is not actually very much if you keep up with it, but it’s a lot to catch up on if you miss more than a few days. Luckily, I still have ten months to go, which is plenty of time if I can make March go better. The way I see it, if I continue to get absolutely nothing done and write just a few words here and there, I can last through May before I’m beyond hope of reaching the end goal of 365,000 words. I am determined to do better than that, and to write much more regularly and hopefully in larger quantities (I’ll worry about quality when I get to editing), so I have plenty of time to catch up.

I also know that many of the ideas for stories and blog posts or internet articles need to be written soon, or I will completely lose track of them. Whether they end up being fit for a reader’s eyes is another question. For now, it’s time to get back into writing! Winter isn’t over yet but spring is closer than any of us think, I’d say. The urge to hibernate has (mostly) passed, and I believe that I can actually get things done as we move out of this blip of a month.