One foot in front of the other
What's been keeping me from writing lately, and other things.
It's been getting more difficult to find the will to write. This week sucked. Without getting into too much detail, work has not been going well; it seems like my employers are doing everything they can to make me feel unimportant and unvalued and all discussions I've had with them about this have fallen on deaf ears. It's left me with little energy or confidence to put towards my own writing or this website. But I'm pushing ahead. One foot in front of the other.
I know a lot of writers count thinking about writing as working on writing and I've at least done a lot of thinking about writing this week. But, whenever I have had a few minutes to myself, it's always easier to just collapse in front of the TV and watch something that actual skilled and successful writers, animators and voice actors have put together—Avatar: The Last Airbender—rather than write some whiny post about how hard it is to write. But, as I've said before, at least writing about how I can't write gives me something to write about.
What I should probably do is pick one of the projects I have managed to scrape together and at least finish something. The review of The Glass Hotel is what I should do first, before the story fades too much from my mind. I just need to not worry so much about making it perfect, because I don't have time between life and my day job to make it a professional-level review. It'll be more of a collection of thoughts and feelings about the book.
My plan of writing and posting one fictional piece per month has obviously failed. I did write two things, but one was more of a description to refer to for future fictional stories and the other was just the quick flash fiction piece I wrote a few weeks ago that I still haven't looked at. I might decide it's so terrible that it deserves to be deleted.
What I'd really like to do is create a fictional world that I can disappear in during my free time, and just have fun and write whatever the hell I want. Or fulfill my childhood dream of going to live in the woods. That's always an option.
When every day is the same, it's hard to be inspired. Taking pictures for my side project cataloguing the plants and animals I encounter on my walks has helped distract me, but I still can't get around to posting about that or figuring out where to put it on this site, or if it'll be too much of a distraction from my creative writing. I know I'm just procrastinating hard. Just name it something, post pictures of plants and animals on the site and write about them. Find time to write about other things too. It's that easy.
Finishing with some positive thoughts, as hard as it's been finding the time and energy for this blog and website, I've really enjoyed working on it so far and only wish I'd started it sooner. It's so much more satisfying to write about things I actually want to write about and not worry about advertisers or the C-suite of my company or any of the things that can make writing for a company so unsatisfying. I'm still anxious about all the things writers worry about when writing, but it's a different kind of fear. It's easier to deal with the kind of anxiety you get when you're being true to yourself than the crushing dread of being forced to be something you're not.