By Bond18 on February 20th, 2009 (more posts by author)

I’ve essentially never experienced writer’s block before. Every article and blog entry I’ve ever written with the exception of ‘Around the World in 90 Days’ was something I did on my own time and on my own pace, and it always flowed out naturally and easily. Although I fell behind in the writing of the around the world blog that was not so much due to any writers block (as after all, I was simply recording what happened to me on a daily basis) but merely lacking the time to complete it. Things have been different lately though.

Since returning from Adelaide I’ve put in little actual volume playing. Last week I decided to start changing my sleep schedule around to play the late night/early morning Euro tournaments. Between the hours of 5pm and 5am Melbourne time there is very little in the way of online tournament action, and for the better part of the last week those are mostly he hours I’ve been up. I told myself I’d spend serious time writing the book during those hours, but for some reason every time I sit down and try to get to it I just wind up staring at my screen for a while, writing a few sentences, blanking out, then wasting time doing something else be it chatting online, reading, watching porn, watching comedy central, putting on a movie, or getting baked. I’ve even got a list of topics worked up and yet when I try to go to work on one, nothing comes out.

On the plus side, I have made considerable strides in the organization of the book and assigning topics to my coauthors. At this point I have about 20 guys who have signed on to contribute something, which takes a considerable load of the actual writing responsibility off my shoulders (though I obviously still need to do a ton myself.) After coming up with the list of topics I showed it to each of them and in many cases made a request or recommendation on what they’d write about, which most have agreed with me on.

Outside of that most of my life lately has been dominated by working out. It seems to be the one thing I have real motivation to do, and I’ve been doing it for about 90 minutes a day. In the case of today I showed up to the gym at 7:30pm, warmed up with a 5 minute run, then lifted weights for an hour, then hopped on a bike and went as fast as I could for 20 minutes until they kicked me out a little before 9pm. Now it’s 2:40am and I’m thinking about going for a run in the park before I start playing poker at 7am.

I also got around to sending in my application for the volunteer work in Kenya and talking to the flight agency about the around the world ticket. As it turns out I’ll only be able to do about three weeks in Africa as the schedule is pretty tight. Also, because of the way the ticket works I’ll be stopping off in London for a few days before I head down to Nairobi so if anyone in London wants to hang out in July and show me around that’d be cool. One very sweet part about all of this is that it turns out I’ll be able to fly business class for nearly all my flights and it will only cost about $7,000 USD for the whole thing (yes I know that sounds incorrect, I double checked too.) Now all I need to do is buy a new laptop and an extra battery for all those long flights and I’ll be good to go.