Defeated, For Now

Woke up on my day off and headed to the coffee shop to write. Did my journaling thing – three pages – but knew (manifested?) even before I opened my laptop that it was going to be a struggle. I started to write new stuff, and I was bored. And haven’t I written enough of it? Isn’t the ending written, or at least some form of it? Where does perfectionism end and procrastination begin? What the fuck have I even written?

I went back into it- reading parts of my manuscript, trying to make sense of it all. I got lost. I got annoyed. The coffee shop was as busy as it’s ever been. Everyone was looking for a table and I was in the back so they kept poking their heads around and looking at me and I wasn’t writing anything and didn’t know what to write and arrrgh, just give up, do it later, do it when you’re in a better headspace, go home and do it, do it tomorrow…

Laundry. Articles about Kim Kardashian and Anna Wintour. Wanting to throw my phone down the stairs – wait, last night I dreamt that the screen was cracked. And finally, this, which honestly feels great. And for the record, I wrote a couple times this week but didn’t blog about it.

I know in my heart that I really do need to start revising the first draft of the novel but I’m just so fucking daunted.

Pep talk: you just need a less messy version of the first draft. Even just take chunks of the original draft and rearrange them into something new, then worry about rewriting it and making it all flow. Think about pacing for now…

Counter pep-talk: You don’t have a concrete ending. Just keep writing it and see what happens.

Reality: You are procrastinating.

2 Comments