No, I don’t mean in others. I mean in yourself. Take me, for instance. There’s laundry to be put away. And some that needs to be washed. The bed should be made, the dishes washed. Coffee made. (I’ve gotten so lazy I don’t even make coffee in the morning now.) Kids’s room cleaned. Desk organized, and reorganized. Books put on the bookshelf.

I’ve got serious character flaws, but probably the most serious would be this inherent lazy streak. Everything in my mind can be done later, preferably same day though, and there just isn’t enough time (or pep pills) in the day!

Of course, my writing suffers from this laziness too. I don’t write as often as I should, and right now I’ve hit a dryspell. I can blame it on having kids at home all I want, but I’m still in a dry spell. I might get out of it later today though (I have a terrific story about M.J. in mind). I hate dryspells. It’s like going for a thirty minute jog, and when you come home–thirsty and dripping with sweat–there’s not a bottle of coldwater in the house. And the water to the tap’s been turned off for construction. Yeah. It’s like that.

So while in the midst of this drought, what do I do? I sit around the computer, waiting for the tap water to kick back in. I could go put the laundry away, start a load, do the dishes, sit back and chill, then make the bed, clean the kids’s rooms, and reorganize my desk. Some days I actually do that. Others I only start. But most times, I’ll say to myself: “I”ll do it in the afternoon. During naptime!”

As if naptime EVER comes. For those without children, you can’t understand just yet. But for those with, you know my pain.

Upon thinking about this awful flaw in my personality, I started to really think about what kind of effect this flaw could have on a character. The main character could be a woman, who lives alone and is stalked by a homicidal knife wielding maniac (no, not Chucky, maybe Myers, but not Chucky definitely). If she were as lazy as me, she’d probably be OK.

Oh, I know. You’re thinking, “What? How?”

If her bedroom looks anything like mine, the killer is going to have a hard time getting across her room to her bed to stab her. He’d probably trip on some dirty (or maybe clean) laundry piled on the floor and land on his own knife.

For any writers out there, that’s something we all really want to keep in touch with. Both the good parts and the bad of our characters, and what effect those seemingly nonimportant traits have on their lives.

My laziness, of course, effects me in that about a half hour–once I’m nice and warmed up, it got ridiculously cold this morning–I’ll get to doing that “To Do” list.