Now, it was really interesting reading this blogchain.
It started somewhere with lying, went through people changing and people taking or not taking rejections, had something about travel in the middle and ended with Top 10 lists. Last poster was L.M. Ashton, writing about scammers.
Now, me, I’m not even at the stage where I could become the hopeless and unlucky victim of a scam because I’m still blocking myself. I’m not writing. I’m not doing a thing of what I should be doing lately.
University is going really slow. I’m not kicking my ass, not moving forwards, not running towards the finish line.
I should be putting my bookshelf and my closet together, finally really moving into my own apartment, not just living between boxes.
I should do so many things. And I’m not.
I’m discouraged with everything at the moment.
All the stories I’ve written, all the novels I started putting together. They’re all not even bad. I mean, I’m sure one could do something with them. Get the ass down into the chair. Rewrite. Write again and then rewrite again and then edit. And then submit.
Then avoid the scammers.
Instead I’m sleeping a lot. Watching TV. Playing some online games and spending time with my family. I’m just living and not moving forwards. And with that I’m scared that one day I’ll find out that moving forwards would have been more important than just living every day the way it comes.
Sometimes I ask myself if I’m slightly depressed. You know the sleeping and not doing a thing part of the story indicates that. But the spending most of my time with my mother and my sibblings (which acutally isn’t my mother and aren’t my siblings, but they are!) doesn’t support that theory.
Maybe I’m just catching up my whole childhood that I didn’t have by now spending my whole bloody time with the family I now have and before never had. I enjoy being with them, I enjoy being loved, I enjoy being the kid even though she’s also my best friend and the best person on this earth.
But, I’m not moving forwards anymore. I’m not a kid anymore. I’m an adult and I should be starting to act like one.
Of course, there’d be an easy way out. That lying thing Auria Cortes talked about in the first post. Yes, I have my masters degree in Psychology. Yes, I published like 23 novels. All in one year. Yes, I’m a millionaire. I so am.
Check out the others, they’re all awesome writers, that’s no lie!
- Auria Cortes
- Life in Scribbletown
- Polyamory From the Inside Out
- For the First Time
- Family On Bikes
- Writes in the City
- Elf Killing and Other Hobbies
- Rotating Bear
- Fantastical Imagination
- Asian Business
- Spittin’ (Out Words) Like a Llama
- As Yet Untitled
- Mad Scientist Matt’s Lair
- Peregrinas
- Delirious
Tags: AbsoluteWrite, Blogchain
Oh gosh – I know all about the sitting there knowing darn well I really should be doing a million things, yet not doing any of it! Fortunately, those periods tend to pass fairly quickly – for me anyway. I hope you get your mojo back soon!!
I see a lot of myself in your post. I started my blog because I needed to get my life moving forward. I recently realized that it moved forward a bit an now it’s stagnant again. I’m no longer working towards my goals, whether they’re personal or professional.
Every morning, I would tell myself that I would get back to the parts of my life I was loving so much and every night I would promise to do it the next morning. Today, I finally got back to one piece and loved it. I have to rebuild my habits, but I’m trying to remember how good it felt to be on track and force myself to do better.
I think that sometimes we are too hard on ourselves when we aren’t doing what we know we should be. The trick is to silence the negative voices and just do it.
You need that kind of lull sometimes. I’ve spent some of my time unemployed to catch up with lost friends and interests, look around and remember why I went into a professional field where I’m bound to make less money than other college graduates in my class.
At the same time, those lulls need to have some kind of boundary. I spent about the first 48 hours after I was laid off lounging around, reading comic books and eating junk food. Before I started, however, I let everyone around me know, “Attention: this is my moment of weakness. I don’t get any more after this. The ass-kicking starts tomorrow.”
College, on the other hand, was just stupid.
College can get more than just stupid. It’s at the stage I’m at, plain annoying.
You may need a short break from writing, just like everyone can need a short break for work. Maybe take a few days “vacation” from writing, then get back to the old butt-in-chair routine once a set number of days (like 3 or 4) are up.
Matt, I haven’t written in months. Just blogging. Nothing else. Otherwise I wouldn’t worry about myself. But I’m not getting myself to restart the whole process of getting back into writing…
I think most of us have taken extended breaks from writing at one time or another. One of mine was a year and a half. I just couldn’t write during that time. The tsunami had happened here, the country was suffering badly, the majority of people I know here had lost family and friends, some of them having lost everyone they were related to. Major suffering. And I’m the oversensitive type who suffers along with them and bawls like a baby when watching the news (so we stopped watching the news), and it blocked me horribly.
Well, we all have our reasons for taking breaks and the reasons are varied. The bottom line is that, yes, at some point, if you want to be a writer, you have to start writing again.
For me, I decided to write something for fun. Not with the end goal of publishing. With the goal of playing. Something that was strictly for me. It turns out that the story will be publishable – when I get around to finishing it – but it was also a lot of fun to write. It was fantasy (I usually write science fiction) and not at all like what I usually write and there was no pressure to turn it into something decent. It just coincidentally turned out that way.
Perhaps doing something like that would help you?
The problem is I am somewhere close to a perfectionist and have the impression that the sentence always has to be perfect at first try, which tends to block me at the very first sentence.. and I’ve been doing that for months now..
The only advise I can offer is to stop complaining about it and just do it. Perfectionism leads to the fabled writer’s block and you have no one to blame but yourself. Write shit. Allow yourself to write shit. That’s the only way you’ll be able to move forward with writing. Write for perfectionism on the first try and you’ll be perpetually stuck there. You have to buckle down and just do it. There really isn’t any other way around it.
I myself took a long break between finishing my last project and starting a new one. If I’d had tried to sit right down and write something, I’d have sit there forever just staring at a blank screen. You need some refresh time…don’t worry over it. It’ll come!
Well, I think this is just a natural ebb in life. We have ups and downs, slow times and frenetic times. Took me 8 years to finish my current novel. Why? Children. Work. And, procrastination. But, in that time the book became better, I got older, experienced things that I hadn’t eight years ago (motherhood is quite the experience) and that informed my writing. So, I wouldn’t worry too much. It’ll come back. Usually there’s a reason for periods like these. Perhaps a daily writing prompt can create something worth coming back to later. Or, pick up a book and just read.
Taking a break is the best thing to do at this moment. If possible go on a trip.