Novel Stats:
| Words Today | 0 |
| Words Total | 872 |
Short Story Stats:
| Written | 0 |
| Submitted | 0 |
| In Circulation | 0 |
| Rejected | 0 |
| Sold | 0 |
Wednesday,
February 20, 2008
Not the best of days
I am having a bit of a crisis as to whether or not I can actually
write. I have two novels currently in machete process, a third that's
half done, short stories that I need to write for various markets, and
I'm sitting here wondering why I can't put the words on the page and
why even trying makes me want to run screaming for the hills.
And yes, believe me, I know how fucking ridiculous this sounds. But all around me people are getting published and winning awards and selling books and I keep thinking, "I should be DOING that." And yet I'm paralyzed.
By the way, this is not writer's block. I know writer's block and how to deal with writer's block. This is more of a general free-floating anxiety about the very action of sitting down at the keyboard and opening Word. If I could do that, I could blather away and write crap with the best of them. But the thought of actually writing makes me want to dive into the nearest crafts project and distract myself with it until the panic goes away.
Part of it is the fact that when I get well and truly sucked into a
story, time goes away and suddenly I look up and half the day is gone.
I know that many writers would be thrilled to bits if that happened to
them -- to me, it's freaking scary. I don't think, "Oh, great,
I did 4000 words today," I think, "Oh, shit, I just lost six hours of
my life." If I was writing something that was requested for a particular
antho or had already sold and I was working to a deadline I might think
differently, but right now everything I write is on spec so there's no
guarantee that I'll see any return on those lost hours.
And to be bluntly honest, since I turned 40 I'm painfully aware that I only have a certain amount of hours left. To quote Sir Arthur Sullivan from TOPSY-TURVY, "My time is finite, and I must fill it with that which is important to me." Writing is important to me, of course, but so is crafting, and reading, and spending time with the Bodacious Brit, and lots of other things.
*sigh* It's not a big deal. Lots of writers run into this at some point, and at some point it will go away. But by God if I can't expose my insecurities on my own damn journal then the world truly is a sad and petty little place.