It's Called BICHOK

For you nonwriters out there, this is the acronym for Butt In Chair, Hands On Keyboard. It’s the battle cry for forcing yourself to write. Last night, I concluded we need a couple more letters.

I’m in the middle of a putting together a good-bye video for the sales manager who’s retiring from our company after 25 years. In fact, I BICHOKed from 9:30a.m. to 6:30p.m. on Saturday. In the end, after countless complications, I was pretty satisfied with the result, only to discover my software program was outdated and that, in fact, I couldn’t save my project as a DVD. (Okay, so I’m no whiz at this stuff.)

To make a long story short, it turns out that all the cool new movie making software seems to run on XP. Guess what my desktop uses? Right. ME. (Am I the only one who ended up with that?) Luckily, my laptop runs on XP so I figured, fine. I’ll download all the upgrades, including the moviemaker.

No problem, I thought.

I rerouted the phone connection (yes, I know I’m a dinosaur) to the laptop and started the process.

I blinked.

Approximate time to complete: 12 hours.

Were they kidding? Surely they must be.

I made the necessary clicks and the download began. Meanwhile, I BICHOKed at my desktop and revised Stealing Amy.

Guess what? I got more done in the next three hours than I had the past week. Could it be because I didn’t check email every five minutes? That I couldn’t IM for an hour? That I couldn’t blah-blah-blog?

I’d never thought of myself as one of those writers who spends more time surfing than writing, but now…I’m not so sure. I mean, I even started writing a synopsis for God’s sake. How desperate is that??

Hence, I nominate two additional letters, making it BICHOKID. Butt In Chair, Hands On Keyboard, Internet Disconnected.

By the way, the upgrade successfully downloaded sometime around 1 a.m.