Writers will find any reason at all to procrastinate. The house needs cleaned. The litter needs scooped. The laundry needs folded. My bladder needs emptied. I can't unsee my nose.
Yes, really.
It takes very little to get us off task, and when it's the shadow of your own proboscis popping up in your peripheral, it's unshakable. The house will be clean eventually. Same with litter and laundry. My bladder refills, but that's a pretty quick fix. But my nose is just kind of there, and once I've seen it I can't get it out of my mind - or my way.
I write in bed, lying down, with my laptop propped up against my legs, and three pillows stacked under my head because I demand good altitude. It's the perfect scenario for my nose to ambush whatever word count goal I have. I usually aim for 1,000 words a day (that's just about 5 pages), and the nose usually pops up to remind me that it exists right around the halfway mark.
And then it's a struggle. Cutting it off is obviously not an option. Ignoring it doesn't work either because it's already been brought to my attention and I'm the kind of person that pounds her problems down into the ground, and hitting myself in the face will only make my nose swell and therefore become a larger object I need to unsee.
Don't get me wrong. I'm glad I have a nose. It's done a lot of good things for me over the years, and I even kind of like it in the aesthetic sense. (Although I would warn anyone against just sitting and critiquing your own nose in the mirror - eventually you lose perspective and it just looks horrendous. The same is true of your tongue. Never inspect your tongue. It moves of its own volition and will have you questioning whether or not you're in charge of it in about five minutes.)
So what's a poor writer to do when your nose is in the way?
The big thing is to remember that your nose has been there all day, and more than likely you probably were seeing it and didn't realize it because you had other things going on. In a lot of ways, unseeing your nose is the best gauge of how good the pages you just cranked out are. If I didn't notice the nose, it's because I was totally into what I was writing. If my nose was a big part of the evening, I probably need to take a hard look at the pages I wrote.
A no-nose night is a good night. Here's to those.