Canning season. The bulk of our preserved food for the year gets put up in these two months. It all comes into season at once, and it’s a hell of a lot of work keeping up with getting it all processed and put away. Subsequently, my writing time has suffered. I sure don’t want to sit down at my computer after spending three hours pitting cherries. Same goes for making 10L of spaghetti sauce. And then there’s the garden, which is a whole other workload. It’s my favourite time of year, to be sure, and nothing feels better than looking at my fully stocked cold room at the end of it, but it’s not my favourite time to be a writer, because I’m scrambling to get in any time at all. Guess I’ll just keep telling myself that I can’t write anything at all if I have to take another job to by store-bought food (or I’m starving).
Category: Things That Are Hard
Uh-oh. Guess which one mine is.
I cannot believe how indifferent I am to writing these days. I have free time most evenings, but I’m not using it at all. I have ideas, I know what I want to write, I just.don’t.feel.like.it. And I feel guilty about it, because I’ve already taken so much time, time that I could have chosen to spend with my family or friends or doing other, productive things, but I didn’t because I felt like this all needed to get out of my head. Now that I’m halfway my momentum has completely stalled and I feel like if I’m not going to continue, then all that time could have been put to better use. Yesterday I had every intention of writing – I had almost three hours set aside – but I kept putting it off, putting it off. Even the threat of having my pie taken away if I didn’t write something wasn’t enough to get me going. I just went pieless. Now I’m sitting here again, in my writing spot, with my writing blanket and my writing laptop perched on my writing legs (okay I don’t have special legs just for writing) I’m procrastinating. First I had bills to pay, then I had some very important facebook things to look at, and now I’m blogging about my failure to progress, despite the fact that everything is in order for me to ACTUALLY WRITE except my brain. My brain wants to check today’s Wimbledon scores and read DYAC. What’s going on, brain? Why haven’t you wanted to write for the past two weeks? Don’t you want pie? Is this a normal thing everyone goes through sometimes, or should I start getting worried? I want to finish. I WANT TO FINISH. Just… not now.
I’m going to open my doc and stare at it until it shames me into writing something, even if it’s only 200 words. Maybe a tiny nudge will get the ball rolling again.
…you spend what seems like a good amount of time writing, and you feel like you’ve really accomplished a lot, and then you check your word count for the day and it’s only like 700 words? And then you ask yourself how the hell it took you two hours to accomplish such a meagre output?
Welcome to my life for the past two weeks.
It’s like chipping away at granite, people. With a toothpick.
By far one of the hardest things about writing for me is choosing names for my fictitious people and places. Callie is actually the third or fourth name for that character, and while in the context of the story it’s the best fit, it’s still not my favourite, although it’s grown on me quite a bit. I’m constantly googling things like “french names for boys” or “common last names” because I can never come up with anything I like on my own. Nothing derails my writer’s flow like introducing a new character – whether significant or incidental – and having to call them something.
It’s been mentioned to me that some of my creations’ appellations are a bit too trendy, and I suppose when looked at in a group, that’s true, but I strongly resist having a book full of Joes and Marys and Bills.
Tonight I’ve actually stopped writing for the night in mid-sentence – “He introduced himself as detective…” rather than spend twenty minutes struggling to come up with something I like the sound of. That’ll be the first thing I can tackle tomorrow night with a fresh head.
It’s nice when something just clicks though. Awhile back I was on the bus coming home from work and saw a word carved into the wall of a bus shelter and knew exactly which character I’d give it to. But that’s just one name, and it’s not the one I need tonight.