Home Contractors Gave Me Writer’s Block!!!!!!!

Yeah, yeah, I know writer’s block isn’t a communicable disease. This wasn’t a situation where a plumber had writer’s block and sneezed all over the place, and I breathed in sneeze particles filled with writer’s block and got it. Writer’s block doesn’t work like that.

No offense to the home contractors, but even if they had writer’s block, they probably wouldn’t know it. They’re just spreaders who don’t show the symptoms. They knock down walls, play loud music, turn off all the water in the house, bring in strange smells, and make the pets nervous.

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Even though my writing has always been inconsistent, I have a basic routine. I get up, make coffee, do a few chores, drink a little coffee, do more chores while the caffeine kicks in, and then write while drinking the second batch. Some days I can churn out 600-900 words in 30 minutes. Some days it’s 200-300. On a slow brain day, all I do is edit and revise. No matter what, though, I need a quiet environment to write.

My house has needed some basic improvements over the last few years, and we finally (kind of) have the money to pay for them. You never really have the money, but anyway, we decided it was time to fix a few annoying things that needed fixing. And so we had to hire some contractors to come into our house and ruin the quiet writing environment for a while.

Contractors have many fine qualities (they can do stuff that I can’t quite do correctly on my own), but they’re not quiet. Their tools make a lot of noise. They talk loudly. Contractors are rarely on time, and work usually takes at least twice as long as they predict. For me, writing needs a routine, and the only routine with contractors is disruption.

Our home improvements were supposed to take five business days, and the whole thing ended up going over three weeks. I’m not going to list everything that went wrong (you can get that on any home improvement cable TV show), but of course, a lot of stuff went wrong. I’m sure half of what went wrong was legitimate and half was a rip-off, but that’s how things go. Even with all the little extras and delays, we stayed within my budget (the contractors don’t have to know that). The house looks a lot better. And it’s getting quiet again, so I can write… maybe.

Unfortunately for my writing, as soon as the contractors finished, just as soon as I thought I could write again, we adopted a puppy. As cute as the puppy is, it is a distraction. Between the whining at night and the monitoring during the day, I haven’t been able to get my writing routine back on track. And I can’t blame the puppy for my writer’s block.

You can’t blame a puppy for anything, except for the occasional mess on the floor, and even then you have to be nice about it. If you try to blame a puppy for writer’s block, people get mad at you. They’ll say you deserve writer’s block. People get spiteful when you blame a puppy for stuff.

So until my writer’s block goes away, I’ll continue to blame the home contractors.

And the teachers.

And the Ivy League.

Now if I can just get the writer’s block to go away.