The temperature when I woke up was 87. (ew.) So the air conditioner has been running since before I came into my room. I’m listening to music, but because of differences in volume, some music is clear over the noise of the AC and some barely audible, and some fades in and out as the volume rises and falls.
This is how writing has been for me lately—sometimes I pick up the pen and barely have to think as the words spill out. Sometimes I get antsy in a way that means I have words that want to be written, but I’m busy with work, or something that needs to be clean or dealt with—this is probably about 95% of the time. Other times, the words are there, and they’re forming full scenes and ideas, but I’m not in any kind of position to put them down—like last night, while I was in the shower, I had pretty much a fully formed story idea start to flesh itself out, when I’d previously had a line or two running through my head the other day.
That doesn’t really seem to make the two things comparable, but when the words flow—that’s when I can hear the music fully. When I’m working and can’t do anything about the ideas—I know the music is playing, but I can barely hear it. And when I get the ideas but can’t write it down, that’s when I hear the music fading in and out.
It’s rather frustrating. For a while this year, I was doing pretty well with writing somewhat regularly. I wrote just over 8000 words the first few months. That’s over double what I wrote last year.
Seriously, I didn’t write even 4,000 words all of last year.
It’s not lack of desire, or ideas—once I get started, that comes easily, it’s just an issue of getting started. A big part of the problem is that there’s a lot of cleaning and organizing that needs to be done throughout the house. And great as Rob is, he doesn’t always see that it’s any kind of problem, because it doesn’t affect him—he has acknowledged this, and copped to it, and admitted that he could do better.
Yes, yes, that’s just an excuse. I know that’s what some people would say, and yes, to an extent, it’s true. But something I’ve learned over the years is that my environment will come to mirror my mental state. So if my office space is messy and full of clutter and the desk is gritty from a coating of pollen and dust, that makes me feel like I’m shrinking in on myself, and thoughts of all the things around that need to be dealt with fill my head and push out the story ideas and words.
The new job—though most of what I do is busy work, with only occasional proofreading and copyediting—is helping to keep writing more in the foreground. But then I still have to keep it there after lunch, when I have time, and then it gets bogged down in trying to figure out what I need to get done—or what I can get done—in the time that I have until Rob gets home from work—which isn’t all that long unless he’s going to be late, or until it’s time for dinner. Or, when I can manage to get my ass moving, what I can do between lunch and exercising, and between exercise and dinner. Because that also is something that I need to be doing more of.
And what’s really annoying—the reason I haven’t written in a bit more than a month—i stopped the scene I was working on because I needed a name. It’s fantasy, so I create some of the names, and I was doing that, then dinner interrupted, then I never went back to actually deciding on the name, and then I didn’t get back to the story, except in my head—mostly during showers.
Right now, I should really be cleaning my desk, because it’s covered in gritty pollen and dust and cat fur, and there’s barely there cobwebs and knocked over figurines—George’s tail is sometimes a bit destructive, and I should really clear the space in front of the window so the cats have somewhere to sit that’s not in my way. But it takes several hours, because it’s not just a quick wipe down, and it’s now lunchtime and kitties want food.
(And posted after lunch, because kitties needed food.)