77. The terrible twos and writing ...

Wednesday, June 22, 2005

Mood: content

Music: Nick Carter

So, first, the terrible twos. I know my kitten is only four months old, but we all know that cat to human years is off. I think I've read somewhere that a cat year is seven years to every human year, so the way I figure it my kitten is going through his terrible twos. What does this mean you ask? Well, this means when I go to bed at 4am, he keeps me up until 7am running around like a chicken without a head. He's done it the last few nights. I was hoping it was a one night deal. But it isn't. He's up and down, back and forth, and he has this thing with jumping on my feet if I move on the bed. So if I move in the slightest, and he sees it, then he pounces. He's actually scratched me a couple of times.

So this morning he kept me up until 7am, and I woke up at 11am. Four hours of sleep does not sit well with me, but I can't help the kitten. I just have to hope he grows out of it. He will with some time. I look down at my feet, and he is curled up by my chair on the floor as I type. Last night, he was reading the screen as I was typing. He sat on my desk, and watched. Then he does this cartwheel thing where he curls up into a ball and rolls over and over. That is his new trick. It's cute, but he tends to do it next to a wall, so this morning I was hearing ... THUMP ... THUMP ... That is what kept me up. He is lucky he's cute. I am telling you.

Since sleep wasn't happening, I went ahead and picked up my copy of On Writing. I'm about a third of the way through the book, and I'm still enjoying it. Well, at 530 in the morning, this small passage caught my eye, and made me think.

" ... none of them taught me the things I learned from Carrie White. The most important is that the writer's original perception of a character or characters may be as erroneous as the reader's. Running a close second was the realization that stopping a piece of work just because it's hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when it feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position."

So how many times have you stopped writing a WIP because it was just too hard to write? How many days have you just not written anything because that day itself was hard? Or you didn't want to write at all? I know in my mind I can't count the amount of times I've just not sat down to write because I have a headache or I am just not feeling in the mood. A writer pushes past that, or the very least tries too. I've heard it time and time again from more than one writer, but it never usually sticks.

For almost two years, I wrote hardly anything. I called it a writer's block. I just stopped writing, and I know if I had really put my mind to it could have written something. Even if it was just 100 words every day. I would have been writing something. The process would have been slow, but it would have been something. Then you write one hundred, and another hundred, and another ... pretty soon you're not just writing one hundred, but two hundred, then five hundred, and then a thousand. Some days you might go back to just one hundred, but still you know those words are a hundred you didn't have the day before.

Just late night, I had that problem. I just didn't feel like writing. Daniel and Kaelin were sitting silent in my head. I poked them with this stick I have handy, and they just looked at me and shrugged their shoulders. So I let them be for a bit. I typed up the passages I wrote for the Chicken Soup project, which I need to send it out later or tomorrow.

I went off and talked to some people. Came back around midnight, and just stared the two guys living in my head currently, and told them that one of them better give me something to work with before I screamed. So Kaelin jumped out for a bit, and he dragged Daniel along, and I wrote two hundred words. Yes, I know. It isn't a lot, but maybe I'll have another thousand word night like I had over the weekend. It's totally possible right? Right. The important thing is that I wrote, and sometimes that is enough.