If you are following me on Twitter, and if you have logged on at just the right times, you may be aware that my wife has started a business providing copywriting and consulting services to small businesses. She wants to work with bloggers, designers, and other creative types – especially people who run handcrafting businesses, of the type you’d find on Etsy.

At the moment, she’s running a holiday giveaway: she’s giving out two one-hour consulting sessions, where she’ll go over the presentation of your site and your web copy and help you figure out how to draw more readers and get the readers you do have to stick around more (and, if you’re selling something, to buy more of what you’re selling). There’s no obligation on your part – all you have to do is head over to this post and leave a comment, and you’re entered into the drawing. The deadline for entering is 11:59 PM EST this Saturday, so head over and leave a comment.

(It is possible that you are now saying “but Chris, what can a copywriter do for me?” I could respond in a number of ways, from listing generic benefits to actually going to your site and giving some pointers, but the bottom line is this: if you go comment on that post, it costs you nothing to find out what a copywriter can do for you!)

I have a suspicion that work is what’s making me not want to play WOW. See, I work two jobs, for a total of 40 hours a week. Both are significant stressors, the first because I don’t enjoy it anymore and I don’t have a guarantee of getting paid (and because, since I set my own schedule, my boss reads that as “you can drop everything at any given time to help me at a moment’s notice”), and the second because it’s dull and repetitive, yet requires enough brainpower and attention that I can’t really think while I do it. Neither has any opportunity for advancement, and neither pays me enough.

You’d think that with all of that, I’d welcome the escape, right? Oddly enough, I don’t. It’s not because I see WOW as work too – in fact, it’s exactly the opposite: WOW doesn’t feel productive enough. See, I have a very strong desire to get out of my current situation. I know I have the skills to be doing a job I actively enjoy, and doing it for enough money to support me and my family. (In point of fact, I’ve been informed in the last month that I’m literally making 1/6 what I could/should be making in my field.) The work that I do, however, exhausts me mentally and emotionally, so I have a hard time bootstrapping myself into being motivated for the work that I want to do. Instead, I think about the work I want to do, chastise myself for not doing it, and additionally get on my own case about doing anything that’s not “productive”.

If I could just get going on the new-job projects, I’d feel more legitimately productive; if I felt more legitimately productive, I wouldn’t have to recoil in horror from anything that wasn’t productive; and if I could get to that point, I could play WOW again.

And that’s why work is killing my desire to play World of Warcraft.