Old Procrasty McCrasterson is rearing her ugly head again. It's been a while since I've seen her. Since I came back from New Zealand and started working again, I haven't done so much freelancing, so these Sunday afternoon procrastination sessions have been much less frequent. .

After getting back from NZ, I totally stopped doing theater reviews, which is a huge burden off my shoulders. For me, the only good thing about being a theater critic was that I could tell people I was a theater critic. I started in New York writing for Backstage.com, and when I moved to LA, I started writing for Backstage West. That had a lot of prestige, so I did it very happily, but then there was a changeover in management. The result was that the two editors who really championed for me were fired and/or forced to resign. The person left was this crotchety middle aged woman who didn't like me very much. From what I heard, she brought back her writer friends who had formerly been banned from writing for the publication, which meant there was no room for an inexperienced young writer with little background in theater.

Luckily I got a regular theater writing gig for a gay men's magazine, which made me feel legit again. I did it for a few years, and got a lot out of it, but it required going to see what was usually not very good theater at least once a week, and every other week I would sit at my computer, paralyzed by the fear that I had absolutely nothing to say about the play. Also, between my former life as a theater publicist and years of writing about plays, I have an enormous basket filled with hundreds of programs, and yet I can count on one hand the number of really good shows I saw.

It was clear that I wasn't cut out to be a theater writer, because I'm really not that into it. I haven't studied it very much, haven't read a lot, and get bored very easily. So it's really been for the best that I stopped being involved. The irony is that now my present life involves travel writing...and I don't travel!

At the moment, I'm heavily researching travel books for two different writers, and I'm about to take on a full-time jobs as managing editor for one of the writer's production companies. This is all good, and I'm thrilled to having finally found a niche, but I still feel like somewhat of a fraud. Yes, I've traveled much more than the average American, and I totally get the importance of experiential travel, to really get a feel of local cultures, flavors and people. So perhaps I'm in a perfectly good place for this role. And I'm a darned good researcher and interviewer, so that's probably what's most important.

But, still, I'm running into the age-old problem, of sitting in front of the computer and feeling like I have nothing of value to say about this topic. It's a frustrating feeling, especially as the clock ticks away and the pile of work doesn't diminish. Fortunately, I've never failed myself in producing something, even it it requires sitting in front of the computer for eight hours straight, checking my email, reading about American Idol and learning recipes for spinach pie. Okay, there was one or two plays where a play sucked so bad that I couldn't even talk about it, and many interviews that were so long that I just couldn't figure out where to begin.

But that's what blogging is for, so perhaps with this I've uncorked the creative flow, and I can start writing for real now. That, or find another cup of coffee and track down Blake Lewis's performance on AI last week on YouTube. Sure, he was singing about a dirty old man wanting to know who's your daddy (seriously, ew) but you have to admit it's kind of a hot song, and coupled with beatboxing that's all "ntz ntz ahhhh" at the end, you get a pretty fantastic performance.