Nowt again.

[feuervogel]

It's hard for me to focus when I have tinnitus.

I took a walk this afternoon, and after I got back, a conversation on twitter got me to the Writing Excuses transcripts* (which I didn't know existed!) and a sense of things I need to work on to get this story moving. But I may be able to do that tomorrow or Sunday, once my tinnitus and general off feeling go away.

*I can't listen to podcasts. I can't pay attention long enough. My mind wanders, or I want to be doing something else. I also can't listen to audiobooks. Sometimes I can't even pay attention to a five-minute news segment on NPR.

Also, if you don't read my real blog, I've put "U8: Alexanderplatz (1989)" on my site. If you like it, share it with your friends.

Comments

[feuervogel]

Some of my twitter soccer friends do a podcast, and I want to listen to it (partly because two of them have nice voices), but I'll be sitting at my computer and start clicking links or reading LJ or whatever, then have to back up because I missed the antecedent.

Weirdly, if there's music playing and I'm trying to focus on writing, I can't at all. It's like the part of my brain that processes language is occupied by the music (which, actually, according to a story I heard on NPR while I was running errands, is the same. They were talking about 2 new books about language learning.)

[krait]

Huh. I find music distracting, but ultimately will tune it out. Many are the times I have looked up at a particularly forceful song intro and said aloud, "Wait, wasn't it just on track two? How has it skipped to eight?" before noticing the clock. :D

[feuervogel]

Yeah, that happens to me, too, but usually I like listening to the CD I put on, so I pay more attention to that than whatever I'm working on.

[krait]

I like my CDs, too! And I will be distracted with listening for the first 1-4 tracks; but eventually some visual stimulus will come along and the low priority of auditory signals means that suddenly I've forgotten the music exists. :D Even if it's just that I wrote a single sentence or went to delete something (or gave up writing and went to goof off on DragonCave!), once my attention span realises there's something to look at, the music is pushed out.

It's really hard to write in that first the-music-is-still-my-focus phase, though! I find myself accidentally typing words from the lyrics into whatever sentence I was working on. *laughs* Makes for interesting research papers, anyway... (Pretty much the only time I manage to listen and write is when I'm absolutely forcing the writing, i.e. it's a paper and it's due imminently.)