Despite the fact that we’re away this weekend, I did a huge grocery order this morning. We do need to eat before we leave, and there’s nothing worse than coming home to an empty fridge and pantry. A hundred dollars goes way, way too depressingly fast in the supermarket. And the cheque for the urgent work I did in July did not arrive today, which is disappointing because HRH gets paid after we come back. The credit line is my fridge’s friend.
However, the price of gas here just dipped under a dollar per litre, so that’s good news.
I’ve been beating my head against this story I’m working on, and against pretty much everything in progress. None of my writing interests me and hasn’t for a while now, which is bad. And the last thing I need to do is start something new, which just perpetuates and/or exacerbates the problem. Not that there’s anything new knocking at my brain. I feel so disconnected from the creative process these days. All the tricks I recommend to people because they generally work — free writing, working on character sketches in various ways and so forth — do nothing for me and never have, mostly because I can’t shake the feeling that they’re a waste of the time and energy I could be using to do Real Work. Not that any Real Work is being done these days, or that this stupid perception is true, but that doesn’t change my inability to work with those kind of exercises. I just can’t get excited about my work.
It’s a slump. It will pass, eventually. When? I have no idea. In the meantime I’ll keep trying.
Hang in there. I’ve been through it. Last November broke me, hard. I haven’t really written anything since February. No time, no energy, no desire… and the growing fear that it was, somehow, just gone – that the thing that defined me had just dried up, disappeared.
But one day… I just started writing again. It’s hard, it’s uphill, it’s learning to walk again when once I flew… but it’s writing.
So hang in there.
I hear you. I don’t do character sketches and free writing and all that because it doesn’t work for me either. I can’t even bring myself to do it when I’m *not* stuck, but beginning a new project or something for which such an exercise might be useful. It just doesn’t work: I get bored about ten minutes into it (if I’m lucky, because sometimes it’s less).
The only thing that works for me is momentum. I have to kick myself very very hard, and just *write*. Usually it takes about a week of writing every day, at least 1,500 words (so, like NaNo, basically) or so, before I get into the swing of things. Then, suddenly, I’m flying again.
It’s very easy for the momentum to cease, like a candle being snuffed out. The longest I ever went with momentum was back in 2006, from February until July, when I was writing every single day of the week. It was a good time, but I lost it somewhere in August.
Last November kind of broke me for this year, too. I burnt myself with the zombies, and couldn’t touch my writing properly until recently.
Yeah, it’s the momentum that fuels me too, and I’ve lost it over the last six months of contracts and recovery time from working/writing non-stop for a few years. I’m never worried I *won’t* write again; its just working up the momentum while pushing that rock uphill that’s the current obstacle, which is doubly hard when you have zero interest in anything you’re writing or thinking of writing (possibly a self-defense thing so I don’t further break my brain until I’m ready, who knows?).
Sisypheans, unite!