Mental Meanderings

The Shoulda, Coulda, Woulda

*sighs* It's happening again... That seemingly endless carousel that plays corny music and goes around and around so often that you feel sick and just want to get off. This is life I suppose. Or the moodswings of a bipolar writer. I WANT to be writing and I'm ripping myself up about it because I know the only reason I haven't been writing is because of ME. I have the time and the passion for writing. But I struggle, every day, to fight past the fear and face the screen or even the notepad.

I have written things. But not a great deal. My blog langishes and wonders if I've decided to take a holiday or if I'm sick. I've found that getting sick often leads me into this shame spiral. I feel too crook to sit up and write my blog so I give myself the night off, and then the next and it gets easier and easier to say, "Not tonight." I wander about and find days or even weeks have gone by without an entry and all that time I have stuggled to call myself to do any writing at all.

Even todays blog should have been done hours ago and I had no idea what I was going to write until I sat here and started typing. So, you cop a whinge which is ok, because sometimes I just need to whinge (whine).

I have a number of projects I 'SHOULD' be working on. Part of my turmoil comes from wanting to accomplish all of them and oscellating because I can never decide which to do now. Whenever one project rises to the surface it's shoved back down again by guilt and confusion. I WANT to finish The Flight of Torque and part of me feels like every other project I work on is stealing time from my book. But I have deadlines with some of these things and others are giving me a sense of progressing in my career while writing this book.

I've tried scheduling and while it works to some degree it is also one of those things that is easy to say, "Not Today" to. For example, every day I have a number of reminder messages pop up at me... One happens at 9PM every night, "Write - FoT" - "Not Today" click. Bye bye reminder, bye bye Fot. Or, "Gardening" - "Not Today" click. Or, "RKLS Daily Poetry Journal" - "Not Today" click. *sighs* It's getting to be a habit that makes me wonder if I'm actually accomplishing any of the tasks I set myself in a day.

I'm on that carousel because I swear I've come up against this evil floundering in the past. I'm contemplating going over my prior blog entries to find the repetitions. Is it regular? Can I plan it and schedule a retreat or something when it happens every two months? I wonder if these occasions are happening more frequetly, if they don't linger as long or if I'm pushing past them faster.

No matter what, even that, would be an excuse not to write. I'm afraid these days and weeks and months of intense non-writing are destroying me as a writer. It's perpetuating a cycle of failure and I'm afraid it will get harder, and not easier, to get back to the writing. I was going to say work but people tell me to stop considering it as work. But it IS work to me. Writing FEELS like the food on my table and the passion in my day. When I DON'T write, like I have been I see the hours wasted the effort devoured, the pages stolen from my life.

I can delude myself with games and DVD's but ultimately, when I step away from the mind candy all I look back and see is a gaping hole where writing SHOULD have, Could have, Would have been. My life is a carousel on a round road full of potholes.

Ok, enough griping. Tomorrow is another day to languish and wallow. Meanwhile, before I head for bed let me just say, that if you're into poetry check out one of my latest RANDOM BLOG PLUG:

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