Okay, its the end of a very quiet week where I could have gotten a lot of writing done but instead I hid behind excuses of “research” and “backstory” and “Winter Olympics” instead of tackling head on the Annie’s Fish rewrite that must be conquered.
I went through stages of “I’m not good enough,” “the story’s not good enough,” “why did I ever think I could write a book, everyone in the WORLD wants to write a book, the competition is too high,” and other familiar feelings of inadequacy and self loathing. This went to the point of keeping me, and consequently my husband, awake at night fretting.
But, as anyone in their right mind knows, there’s no way out of this kind of situation but to dive in and do the work. Nobody’s going to do it for me, and if I let it scare me stiff, it will never change to something less scary, and it will never get done.
So this morning, cue the Rocky soundtrack fanfare (which is easy to do as they’re playing the newest Rocky movie, the one where he’s old, on French TV this weekend, thus lots of commercials), I cleaned off my desk. I put all the unfinished paperwork, uh, somewhere else (don’t look at the desk behind me), I moved my standing file folder that stares at me saying “you should be job hunting, you should work on your illustration portfolio, you should finish this other book you started writing a few years ago, the manuscript’s right here” to a different shelf, out of eyesight. In its place, I put the flowers I received for Valentine’s day and my lucky Day of the Dead skull with bright pink flowers in the eye sockets and turquoise curly-cues on the cranium. I cleared my schedule, whipped up a raspberry Emercen-c, and I’m gonna do it.
