contemplativeThe climbing was going pretty well, and the weight-lifting, before the pneumonia thing started. But curiously, it's hard to squat 200 when you're coughing up alien civilizations and your toes, so when I come back to it, I expect to be significantly deloaded. *dogsigh*
But I didn't come here to talk about sports injuries. I came here to talk about the problem of my writer brain. Which is, more or less, I've realized that writing stopped being fun at all immediately after I attended a pro-level workshop in 2007 (there was so much else going on in my life at the time that I didn't actually connect the two things until later) and turned into an exercise in willpower, grim determination, and consciously applied craft and skill and technique.
I got a lot better from thinking about it so much. But I also got a bit like the centipede that gets around just fine until somebody asks him how he rums.
So here I am with 62 pairs of red Converse All-Stars and the laces are a hopeless knot.
I was getting through basically by gutting it out for quite a while: I'm a very stubborn girl, and I can do an amazing amount on willpower and discipline. The thing is, well, somewhere in the middle of that second draft of An Apprentice to Elves, well. Something just kind of snapped. Went sproing. And the gears have been grinding louder and louder ever since.
Add that to a moderate case of overwork and burnout, and....
So I have to figure out how to relax and trust myself again, I guess. To actually engage with the stories on a level of feeling excited by them and enjoying them, instead of wading through oceans of self-loathing to get there. As regular readers of this journal will recall, all of this is of course gorgeously complicated by a really exciting history of complex PTSD, some of which has gotten kicked to the fore again recently by some triggery happenings...
Basically, I'm in the ridiculous position of having the job I always wanted, a job I love and am good at... and not being able to do it because I'm too busy second-guessing myself.
Which is why the deadline stuff is getting pushed back a bit, so I can have some breathing space and try to get rid of some of this pile of "should" and turn it into "want to" without the hyper-critical selfconsciousness and feelings of being overwhelmed and scraped thin.
But it's February 1st, which is when I told myself I'd get back on the horse, and I've printed out some short fiction I'm poking at, and I'm going to see what I can start doing with it in as relaxed a fashion as possible.
Wheeeeeee. :)