Showing posts with label failure. Show all posts
Showing posts with label failure. Show all posts

Fear and (No) Motivation in St. Louis

>> Friday, August 7, 2009

I have not accomplished any writing for at least a week now, possibly somewhat longer. I've lost track, actually. So many things are going wrong for me in my life that I have trouble picking up the pen and putting it to paper. I've finally tracked the phenomenon down to fear, in the last couple of days--fear that I will fail in my writing, too. Fear that my work will get rejected again, as it has countless times before. Fear that I really can't write after all, because I don't have any talent, and that people are only lying to be "nice" when they tell me they like my work.

I guess I figure that since nothing else is going right, why should my writing? I'm thinking in particular of the short story I sent in to a magazine, which I am waiting to hear back about, and also of the novel that I am currently close to finishing.

So how do you get over the fears and start to write again? How do you make yourself pick up that pen? Do you just write through the fear, or do you need to do something, a cleansing ritual or what have you, before you can again? Thoughts and advice, my fellow writers?

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Slow-Going...

>> Saturday, March 8, 2008

I feel like I'm plodding along so slowly in my writing that slugs are passing me, slathering me in their slime as they speed away. Hm. Actually, that's probably the most creative sentence I've written in about a week, right there.

I haven't been doing a lot of fresh writing lately. If I do, it's only bits and pieces. Nothing significant. I'm still working on my new short story. I didn't get it done for that deadline, but I figured I wouldn't, all things considered. There's just too much going on in my life right now. I'm trying so hard to get the apartment set up for the baby, but I can't do it all myself and my husband is almost never able to help me. He's always working overtime so we can pay bills and buy groceries, and I barely see him anymore. The little time he is home, we're both sleeping for most of it. So I'm doing most of the housework and preparations myself, but at this point in the pregnancy, there's a lot I just can't do, and it seems he never has time to help me. So nothing gets done that needs to get done, usually. It's frustrating.

On top of all that, I'm not sleeping well anymore. I find I can only sleep for about 2-5 hours anymore, before I wake up and can't get back to sleep for several hours. So the upshot of all that is that I can't even get a lot of housework or preparations for the baby done myself because I'm so tired and I have no help. And trying to write when I'm tired is just about impossible.

Probably the most I've been able to accomplish in relation to writing the last few days is to read some of a book I have on how to write magazine articles, produced by Writer's Digest.

And did I mention we're in financial and other stress again? We're always tight on money as it is, but Tuesday a really bad snowstorm hit our area, and we got dumped on big time. You could hardly see anything while driving, so we ended up canceling our appointment to interview a pediatrician that morning and went home. I tried really hard to convince my husband to stay home and not go in because of the weather, but I couldn't...and not too long after he left, he got in a car accident due to the snowy, icy roads. So, unfortunately (long story short), he didn't get in to work that day. He was okay, but the other lady in the accident was complaining about neck and back pain even though she seemed to be moving and walking around just fine, so my husband is worried she's going to take us to court and sue. And we can't afford to go to court and hire a lawyer, much less be sued. It would put us in debt that we'd never be able to get out of, probably, since we're barely making it right now as it is, and since we're already a little in debt right now anyway. How are we supposed to support ourselves, much less our baby that's almost HERE, for crying out loud, if we have to go to court and get sued? We're barely squeezing by as it is.

Those are the major things going on right now. There are a million other smaller things going on, too. Our family just can't seem to get a break. I'm trying hard not to get depressed or dwell on things and worry--or let my husband do it, either--but it's hard not to. And needless to say, it's hard to do a lot of writing with all of this happening around me and being on my mind. Still, I'm trying. Probably not as hard as I should be, but I just can't seem to get a decent night's sleep to be able to have enough energy to get anything done. I find myself falling asleep for unintended naps when I sit to rest, and waking up hours later. It's frustrating.

Well, at least tonight I read two and half chapters in that book on magazine writing. So I got something accomplished, right? That's more than I've managed in a few days, writing-wise...

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Unproductive Day

>> Tuesday, January 15, 2008

I'm in a very bad mood today. And by bad mood, I mean everybody duck for cover, it's going to be worse than World War III.

Why am I in such a bad mood? Well, the short of it is that I didn't get any writing done today, and that really, really irritated me. Now, why didn't I get any writing done today? Because I decided to finally start undecorating our Christmas tree and taking down Christmas decorations because it's been put off all too long, despite assurances otherwise that we would get around to it soon. So, annoyed, I hauled the boxes up from storage myself, undecorated the tree (which was an irritating experience in itself considering our tree is beyond dying by now, and kept shedding millions of pine needles as I took the ornaments and then the lights off of it), and took down some of the other decorations.

But even all of that wasn't as bad as trying to put the stupid Christmas lights back in their packages. It's much easier to get them OUT of the box than back IN to the box, I've discovered. So, I spent hours wrestling three separate strings of lights back into their boxes, and got no writing done whatsoever. Thank goodness we had a smallish tree and I didn't have even more lights sets to put away!!!

Anyway, I failed to reach my 500 words for the day, and I didn't get a chance to read fairy tales to retell for that contest, either. The most I managed to accomplish today in terms of any of my goals was to apply to a job position that I've been considering for a while now. Today was the deadline for application, so I finished getting all of my materials prepared and gathered and faxed it all over to my potential employer's office. Now let's just pray that by some miracle I get the job...

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