When life attacks

I know everyone else who posts here is at minimum very busy, with frequent excursions into Chinese curse interesting territory, and I suspect most of our readers are the same. Most of you have probably worked out I'm now into week three of Chinese curse territory, and my writing output has suffered rather a lot.

My usual methods of dealing with an overload of life, the universe and everything involve computer games with much smashing of stuff, mindless puzzle games (yes, I know that's technically contradictory, but for me, they are), reading if there's a good book or I'm catching up on a new webcomic (lately Girl Genius has been getting the treatment) - anything that I don't have to actively think about but takes all my attention. The thing is, the more interesting life gets, the more of this I need to do before I'm able to write - and then I run into the narcolepsy wall and have to go fall over because the damned alarm goes off way too early on work days. What writing is happening is getting slid between the spaces early in the morning at work, before everyone else gets in and things go crazy again.

Right now, my methods of clearing the mental plate so that writing can happen aren't working too well - what works for everyone else? How do you tell life to take a hike (with or without the one-fingered salute) when it starts getting way too busy and entirely too "interesting" for your sanity?

Where am I going and why am I in this hand basket?

So Dave has talked about the way forward for the industry as a whole - and boy did he open the floodgates with that one - Rowena about what we use for inspiration, and Sarah about plotting and pantsing. This leaves me wondering what on earth I should be talking about, since, gee, I'm the itty bitty minnow in this pond of writers.

Scootching back a bit, Amanda's posted some interesting commentary on ebook, advances and royalties, John's talked about cheesy, bad taste headlines spawning stories, and Chris about crit groups vs going it alone. I'm not going any further back, but...

Is it my imagination or do I see the signs of a huge unmet need hanging around out there waiting for something to show up and provide it? We're living in what might charitably be described as interesting times for any number of reasons, but in a lot of ways we (meaning humanity in general and this subset of it in particular) have never been better off. Just thirty years ago the notion that someone would be able to type something, click a few buttons, and make it available to anyone in the world who wanted to see it wasn't merely insane, it was unthinkable. Literally unthinkable - there was no framework for the idea. Science fiction of the time has, assuming my often wonky memory hasn't jetted off to the Bahamas without me again (and it never sends post cards, either. sniff.), improved communications like video phones and often instant connection across vast distances. I don't recall anything I read that included anything like the ability for anyone to say anything and hang it out for anyone to see.

And yet... There's something missing. It shows in the responses to Dave's question about old-fashioned adventure stories and to a lesser extent elsewhere.

So I ask, what are we missing? Here we are with all this stuff we never dreamed of as kids, with friends from all around the world that we can more or less talk to, more or less free, any time we want. New books are flooding out at an unprecedented rate (aka title churn) but we writers aren't satisfied - and probably more to the point, we readers aren't satisfied.

I have my theories about why, and they tie into Dave's post from Monday, with the usual erratic segues all over the entire cognitive realm, but right now I'd like to know what you think is missing.