Thursday, August 14, 2008
:will:
My blog fell down for about seven hours today. Did anyone notice? Heh.
This picture is the first four letters from Willoughby’s name on his door - but it also a what I needed this morning.
WILL. A strong will. (We partly chose W’s name, because we figured if people wanted to shorten it when he gets older - ‘Will’ is a good name for a young man… & may his always be strong and resilient!)
This morning I had three child-free hours to work on a entry for one of those big and scary literary competitions with the large cash prize, the kudos, the door to potential publication…
I am entering this competition “without hope, without despair” as the saying goes.
But this morning, I wanted to do anything BUT sit with my poems and knock them into order and shape to go into this competition.
Here is how I was feeling:
grumpy, itchy, scared, distracted, nervous, scared, irritated, fidgety, wriggly, scared, angry, frustrated, excited, full of yearning, and scared and scared and scared.
I have to get into a certain space to do these kind of entries and submissions. I call it “getting my hate on”. Or I call it “getting into my knife-fighting mood”.
To do it, I have to have a visceral, almost tangible battle with some sick, sad, self-sabotaging part of myself.
To do it, I have to highly caffeinate myself. I have to put abrasive music on loud to distract myself from the fact I am engaging in ambitious writerly behaviour.
(This morning the songs on high rotate were ‘Sirens’ by Dizzee Rascal, ‘Light Rail Coyote’ by Sleater Kinney and ‘Alive’ by Shihad. I like to write and edit to obnoxious loud music. One of the joys of working alone and from home!)
Why am I telling you all this?
I don’t really know, except to perhaps share with you some of the ongoing difficulty I have with trying to ‘make it’* as a writer.
I want it so badly sometimes it hurts, while at the same time, sometimes it feels like I will do anything to avoid making it happen.
How weird is that? I perplex myself. I really do.
***
* A friend emailed after reading this post and asked me to clarify ‘making it’ - so for his sake, what I mean by ‘making it’ at this stage is publishing a book. Only when I have a book out will I feel I ‘made it’ and I know that is just the beginning of a whole lot of other ambitions/problems/goals - but that is the ‘it’ for me right now.
