I was on a roll this morning.

I had worked diligently on my novel, and was kicking around ideas for a post to the site, but I had to take a break, for, umm… er…

OK, OK, I had to use the bathroom.

Yup, being an author is pretty glamorous.

Anyway, I closed my laptop and went off to take care of the necessities, if not the niceties, of daily life. I planned to come back and work on a blog post, then do some bits of site management.

In other words, I was being productive, and feeling pretty good about it. One little bathroom break wasn’t going to break my stride.

Then I came out of the bathroom to find my lovely wife contentedly tapping away at the keyboard on my laptop.

I don’t mean to sound ungracious, but she got an iPad Mini for Christmas – and she loves it.

Part of the reason she got her iPad was because she often wants to be in the same room with me while she works on the computer and I write. I always use my laptop to write, and I usually do that in the living room – away from our desktop computer.

The iPad allows her to join me wherever I’m working.

I like to tease her because it seems like when I need to use the desktop – to pay bills or whatever – she has a habit of materializing in front of it before I can sit down. I like to claim she does this deliberately to needle me, while she feigns innocence. It’s become an ongoing joke between us, that she’s trying to thwart my attempts at productivity. It’s not true, but it’s fun to tease her.

She’s never really done it with my laptop, though.

So when I came out of the library – er, bathroom – and found that she’d hijacked it, I was slightly put out.

Where is her iPad? I wondered.

Is she doing this deliberately?

Does she want me to fail? [sniff].

Settle down, over-reactor.

It is so easy to come up with excuses to accept defeat and assume inactivity – even excuses that involve overblown nefarious conspiracy theories, cooked up just because your spouse wanted to send an email while you were indisposed.

My wife is the absolute last person on Earth who wants me to give up on my dreams. She is the last person who wants me to fail.

She is my first and most ardent supporter, even if what I’m pursuing causes her to have to sacrifice some comfort as well. In short, she’s fantastic, and I was too quick to find a reason to get my knickers in a twist over a five minute interruption.

Interruptions happen.

Sometimes life happens in the interruptions – it doesn’t always require you to be charging ahead with no break.

While my wife was hijacking my laptop, I had time to get another cup of coffee (the elixir of life), relax a bit, and re-focus before sitting down to write again.

And to be perfectly honest, if she hadn’t usurped my laptop when I wasn’t looking – I might still be wondering what today’s post topic would be.

So thanks, love!

You can interrupt me anytime.