I haven’t written anything on here for a while. I blame Fantasy Football. And that isn’t a joke. I am an unabashed fanatic when it comes to American football. There’s one particular team I root for, but I’m supremely interested in the goings-on of each and every franchise. I’m always visiting Yahoo! Sports, SI.com or ESPN.com to gain bits of information about players, teams and coaches. I visit blogs, much like this one, dedicated to football. It’s actually quite ridiculous when you think about it.
But I love it just the same. I can’t get enough of football. I love everything about the sport–except perhaps the amount of money the men playing it receive. Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with an athlete earning millions of dollars to play the sport I love and they excel at. I only have a problem with them making tens of millions of dollars.
But I digress, a huge part of my football jones is playing fantasy football every year. I think of myself as a fairly knowledgeable person when it comes to sports of any kind, but Fantasy Football has brought my knowledge of football to skyscraper-level heights. I know more about the third string wide receivers of a team I have no rooting interest in whatsoever than I know about my family tree. And that’s no exaggeration! I’m not one of those types of people that starts dozens of fantasy football teams every year, but when I do get my two teams started (two is the ABSOLUTE limit after a six team fiasco years ago) I dedicate massive amounts of time to scouring the internet for news about the players I have, the players my opponents have, and even the players that NEITHER of us have because if some obscure player breaks out and has a nice season (statistically speaking) you want to be the guy that picked him up and used him to claim victory.
During football season I probably dedicate nearly as much time to fantasy football as I do to the craft of writing. It’s a sad state of affairs, but it’s undoubtedly true. I also dedicate copious amounts of time to watching football and sports news programs on television. It all adds up to create my least productive time of the year writing-wise.
The problem is that this year–as I’ve mentioned–is going to be my most productive year yet as far as getting my work out there for people to see. I have writing assignments lined up at this moment, and I’ve found myself putting them off from time to time as I minimize the Word document so I can spend a few more minutes tweaking my fantasy football rosters. This is a serious problem.
However, I think the first step in solving any problem is realizing it’s there. At times in the past I’d put everything I was doing with my writing on the backburner whenever an interesting or enjoyable distraction crossed my path and thought nothing of it. Fantasy football is something I really enjoy participating in, but I know that to be a successful writer I need to take a step out of the fantasy world and move back into reality.
As hard as that might be…
