My Life Is So Hard!

So I have been having the worst time lately. Maybe it is because I am getting old, but lately I have really been wanting to write, but it just hasn’t been happening. So I have been doing that which is very unlike me and I have been opening myself up to take advice from the world. I used the google-machine and found a couple of blogs about writing and I read them a little. One said that the best way to overcome writer’s block is to buy a brand new, totally blank notebook. Well I have done that. Another said that the key to writing is to sit down every day and write something. This is Flannery O’Connor’s thing about, “ I sit down at my typewriter everyday so that if inspiration comes, I am there to receive it”. Well, here I am, at my keyboard waiting for a signal.

Honestly, I have never liked the term “writer’s block”. It seems like one of those fancy-pants mental conditions that can be cured with aromatherapy. Yet, here I am. All blocked up. And I don’t expect you to feel sorry for me or anything, “Oh, poor dear, your life is so hard!”

I own precisely one book on writing (I have generally avoided buying such things because they always struck me as kind of lame, ego-centric navel-gazing) and I pulled it off the shelf recently and I flipped through it and it said (and every other book on writing says) to have your own little fortified space. A place just for writing. Like your own little secret garden. Well, I usually write at the dining room table (and I have done some good work there) but I went and cleaned up our spare bedroom (Violet and I have a two bedroom place because she scored us an amazing deal on Craig’slist a year and change ago – it’s not because of all the money I make at the coal mine) and I moved my crappy desk into a better writing spot with better light and a more prominent place in the room. I staged it so that if some stranger peeked in they would be all like, “Oh, this must be someone’s writing area, what with the prominently places desk and all the bulletin boards.”

Anyway, immediately after I moved the room around, Violet and I went on our trip and so this is really the first chance that I have had to sit at he desk and try to blow the dust out of the creative parts of my brain.

As you can tell, it is not going well so far.

I even bought a little plastic cartoonish Virgin of Guadalupe and put her and the bookshelf behind me, yet still, no dice.

One of my biggest problems, I think, is that I tend to have a lot of things going all at once and so whenever I feel blocked, it makes me feel guilty, because I have no excuse, because I have so much to be doing.

But, if I can be honest with you, I think that my biggest problem (and this is as a person, as well as a writer) is that I am constantly stressed out by the fact that time is passing. I have no illusions about the fact that I am pushing 30 and not published. I have now spent more than half of my life smashing words together like physicists do with particles, hoping that something meaningful comes out of it, and I am still not a real writer.

This is when Violet always tells me that I have been published like sixe time sin the last year and that I have had plays performed and scripts produced, and then I make some irrational argument about how I don’t have a published novel. Then she gets frustrated and tells me to go finish the one I have been working on and then I start to feel guilty again because I should be.

So now that I’m sitting here, at my writing desk in my writing room, why don’t I just do that?

I don’t know. And this is going to sound like a cop out, but I just don’t feel like I have the words in me right now. I feel tired and fat and old. I don’t have the zest and zeal that it takes to write well. I know what it feels like when the writing is in my body, and I just don’t feel like that right now.

It is quite sad. It feels like being abandoned by your lover.

So anyway, I will continue to sit here for awhile and type things and erase them. If I sit here and don’t get anything written, is that better or worse than not sitting down here at all?

Oh, and I’m not trying to feel all sorry for myself and all whiny. I’m just feeling a smidge out of sorts. Though I see now that I have writer 800+ words since I sat down, though of what quality I can’t say.

Anyway. I think I’m just rambling now.

Sorry.
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