Musical Distraction

I recently finished a round of revisions on my latest manuscript and sent it off (yay!), but along the way I made a little discovery. It's no secret that I write with music in my mind. Before starting a manuscript, I create a playlist - all kinds of music are involved. During the actual writing, no lyrics are allowed, but during edits or while I'm researching, the playlist is going. So, of course, during these revisions, there was much playing of the playlist.

No, I didn't get tired of it. The discovery that I made was that I can't have music videos mixed up with non-videos. In fact, it's probably best if no videos are used at all in the making of a playlist. Because then I feel obligated to watch the darn things and sometimes start them over. Darn videos anyway.

When I first started creating playlists, I'd burn them to CD - but no one makes CD players anymore, especially not the kind you can take along on walks with you. So I switched to using my iPod Nano a few years ago. Then, two years ago, my husband bought an iPod Touch for me for Valentine's Day. Open the heavens, the angels were singing on that day. A device I could use to Skype, text, play games *and* listen to music? Wow, color me impressed.

I have music, music videos, even movies on my iPod now, and before this round of revisions I'd never noticed that, in my playlists, the videos always distract me. Always. I hook it into my radio, a video comes on and whammo! Eyes are dragged to the iPod, not my computer. Take a walk and I find myself tripping over sidewalk cracks because if a video is playing I'm not watching where I'm going.

Not sure what this says about me, but no more videos in my playlists. Even if I have a buy a song twice to get a 'just' song and 'with video' song on my playlists.