Tuesday 1 March 2016

Now I'm getting desperate

In the past year, writing has flown out the window. Oh there have been bouts and spurts of writing. Those twenty minute, once a day pages, which made me feel wonderful and probably had some good stuff in them but which ultimately I wrote and then abandoned, lacking the will to go back and work on them. I have my current notebook, full of sporadic and at times page prolific scribbles, with some interesting ideas. What I don't have is the focus or courage or energy to run with those random thoughts. I've lost it completely. Is this writer's block? I don't think so. My thoughts are constantly turning phrases, ideas, story lines - running through my head like a manic ticker tape (I suppose that little image dates me) - churning them out like a factory production line, except there is no production. I feel daunted to take up any challenge. So many documents started and saved (ever hopeful) of the next best idea, so many fresh/false starts to the eternal book which will not let me go, but nothing completed. This feels like something other than a block. It is as if I've crossed a river, found a new country of living and life and everyday distractions but long for and miss the 'old country'. I am at a loss.



I wish for a long period of isolation, just me and my laptop (oh and a printer, wifi, phone signal, a warm comfy bed, a clean modern bathroom, maybe a little car to run into the nearest town for supplies - food and stationery, because we all need to eat and some of us just love brand new blank pages and full pens), what I don't want is meals to be cooked for others, supermarket runs, social obligations, dogs and cats to be fed and walked, unsolicited conversation or any of the other precious ordinary everyday ripples which I would probably miss but just get in the way.


I suspect I am not alone out there with these feelings. But because I'm  over the sixty-year hump, I know there is no longer the time for dreaming or what ifs or if onlys. There isn't much time full stop and I am wasting it every day, watching it trickle from my fingers and am paralyzed to do anything about the waste - not the time, even I know I can't stop that.