Friday 27 May 2016

It's almost everything I need

I worked head-down to finish the first novel of my time here. It was one that I liked, and it has merit, but it wasn't the one that I came here to write.

So now I'm trying, with the time that's slipping away here, to write the one that I've been failing to do for a couple of years. It's almost painful. No, it is painful. There's nothing that flies off the page about it. It never really moves by itself at all. I am shoving with my shoulder braced against it, and the full weight of my pushing-self pressing into it. I feel it pressing back. Pressing down on me. This is the last time I'll try to make this book work.

I've pulled together all of the separate segments I had, and typed them up together, which brings me to about a third of the way through the book. I had a brainwave about the ways that the storylines need to be connected together, and I've put that in, but now everything hangs in the balance of me figuring out the details of that connection, and making it work. I feel like I'm trying to chip off wall-paint with my fingernails. I'm revealing tiny little details bit by bit, and it takes a huge amount of work in order to be able to see any progress. And it fucking hurts.

This song feels right to me today:


Tuesday 9 February 2016

Pretty soon now, I won't come around

I've started a new blog - just temporarily, and with a specific purpose that has nothing to do with this one. But, that new blog made me think of this old one, which stays here limping along, mostly being updated when I need a hole to scream into.

I love this blog - love being able to look back on it at all the things that have changed for me over the years that I've kept it....almost seven years apparently, though I know that I've been very poor at doing it for the most recent couple of them.

The Beautiful Girl was asking me to update this recently, but I think that sometimes I feel that this is a space I turn to when I want to work through a problem I'm having. Usually, not a personal one, as that would go into my paper journal. It's often a creative one...or a lack-of-creative-powers one. And I guess that lately I've been far more successful at keeping my work on the page, and getting my writing done in a dedicated manner.

I've been having a break from writing for a bit though - trying to gear up to start a new project...or rather, to restart a project that I've been trying and failing at for a while. So, perhaps that's why I'm in the mood to blog. Hopefully, from next week I'll be going at it without pause. I'm leaving the internet and other distractions behind to head into the Italian hills.

Mostly, it's scary, because if I can't write there, then there are no excuses - no complaints about lack of time or space to think. There's only me to blame. I hope that doesn't happen.