Rant & Rave

None of the lights in my room work.  My fan clicks and clacks and refuses to center.  My favorite clothes are all getting holes in them.  And, I’m so frustrated with not being able to get online on my computer that I feel a primordial scream deep inside my gut, begging to be let free.  I can’t let it free, of course, because it’s ten o’clock, and everyone is sleeping, and they would probably lock me up. Again.  If this were my house, I would cancel my service with Qwest, subscribe to Cox, and get a wireless modem that actually works.  But, this is not my house, so I get to rant and rave instead.

I’ve been doing alot of blogging lately.  I envision it as great practice for writing, but find myself getting so caught up in it, that I know it’s turning into more of an excuse not to write.  It’s so much easier just to tweak the look of a screen, than to pull out my heart and staple it to a page like I’m supposed to be doing.  I find myself reading, studying, playing with pictures, sleeping, God…even cleaning, instead of actually writing.  That anxiety just doesn’t want to go away.

Some of my reading has at least been understanding on the subject.  I like what Eric Maisel had to say:

When you shake up a snow globe, first the snow swirls chaotically, then it

begins to settle nicely, and then all is guiet again.  When you think about

writing, you do something equivalent to that shaking.  You shake yourself

up and make inner chaos and worry.  Experienceing all that chaos and

worry, you don’t want to write.  What you forget is that you could settle

down and achieve necessary quiet, if only you gave yourself half a chance.

Picture a snow globe whenever thinking about writing shakes you up. 

Picture the chaos, then the settling, then the quiet.  When things are

swirling around you or swirling inside of you, use the image of a snow

globe to help yourself settle down, get quiet, and write.

Excerpted from: Write Mind: 299 Things Writers Should Never Say to Themselves (and What They Should Say Instead) by Eric Maisel, PhD, 2002. Tarcher/Putnam

I think I’ll leave it at that, and try and let the swirling chaos of my mind melt away into something more productive, like laundry or making a cake.