Does anyone have any pointers for staying on task while underemployed?

[coalition_unwilling]

42. Tee-hee-hee. During a slow summer once, while at a very dull job working

as a writer\editor for a greedy, unctuous owner (and what other kind are there, really?), I read Bruce Catton's entire 3-volume history of the U.S. Civil War. I too was underemployed (but had an office door I could shut for lengthy periods of time). In retrospect, I could have and maybe should have done what you are doing, i.e., wrote the Great American Novel. (I did finish a manuscript of poetry and a couple short stories, subsequently unpublished, during that long, hot summer.) My immediate boss despised the greedy, unctuous owner as much as I did, so even if she knew what I was up to, she wasn't going to say anything.

My advice: try to get a writing\editing job because it makes disguising your own writing and editing so much easier, kind of like hiding in plain sight