What I Learned From Zoning Out

Plane twelve hours late. Da** airlines.

Wait... this isn't 6 Word Story... wrong writing assignment... And it appears the G rating is in effect... ;-)

Middle Zone Musings's new writing project for this month is up, and I'm game to write on it! Topic is "What I learned from... Vacations!" so here goes.

Vacations... vacations... I've had so many... I've been to Orlando, Las Vegas, Washington, Idaho, Canada, Massachusetts, NYC, and California (some of these are not as exciting as they sound. Some are.) Not to mention closer to home vacations like camping and bumming around the house. There's also the little vacations I take in my head that last about ten minutes at a time during classes I don't like. Or the ones when Osedax starts talking about technical stuff and my eyes glaze over (it's okay, she knows I do this.)

Let's focus on the latter two: my little daily ten minute vacations. In the former case, I'm not learning anything anyway, and, in the latter case, it's over my head so I'm not learning anything anyway, so it seems to me like the best use of this time would be to unfocus my eyes and think about something else (such as this writing project.) Now, this may seem impolite, but in a class of dozens the prof's not going to notice and Osedax expects it, she just wants to say her ideas out loud to see how they sound. I don't really need to be there in either case.

Surprisingly, this has never got me in trouble. I had a stats class that I used these little vacations to take 10 minute naps, waking up only to write down whatever she wrote on the board. Good way to get energy after 4 hours of sleep a night. However, with Osedax I can't just take a nap (now that would be rude!) and some classrooms are too small to be able to politely fall asleep in. So, what can be thought about in random ten minute increments?

Writing of course! I'm currently using these ten minute timeslots (I still have them, despite a lack of school and Osedax right now) to plan out my next NaNoWriMo project. Now, I'm going to admit straight up that the original idea for this story is two smashed together dreams combined with random thoughts I had while watching a Discovery Channel "What if...?" show, but I think it's going to be good. Especially since I'm actually planning this year, and not just writing to the finish like last. There's even a program I'm using called yWriter (more on that later) that's really good for organizing thoughts, storyboarding, and character backgrounds. However, I haven't started using that too much yet, I'm mainly going off of the 10 minute mini-vacations I take throughout the day. And, because of this, I'm sure my writing's going to be much better this year.

The bottom line is, let no time be wasted, 'cause you could be doing something fun, even if everyone else in class is bored out of their skulls.