There is this monster in my head. I have to wrestle him to the ground, tie him up,  knock him out, or ply him with sweet words, research, and let him sort and take out the trash  before I can set about my real work. What I am supposed to be doing…

“Oh, but you need to get caught up at work.”

“Just a few minutes to check what year that movie came out, it could be important for your book. You know you have to get your facts straight.”

“Just one more trip to the kitchen, then you can get down to work.”

“Let’s wait until tomorrow. You are always so fresh in the morning.”

I thought I had mastered it. Boxed it up and stowed it under the bed. Here it is, after only a week, larger than before. How did this happen?

My confidence was shaken. It’s true. My skin isn’t as thick as I thought it was. Intellectually I know I must keep going or I will never get there, but the baby in me wants to mope another day and get lost in an old favorite: pulp fiction. It is back apparently, and I need to get caught up!*

Crap. It’s the same as not exercising only worse. Now I feel I have betrayed my best self, my true self, the person I was finally becoming, for what I still can't figure out. I had been running, stumbling, or just plain lost in the woods and then all at once, with one sure move, I ran toward an opening in the trees and met the road, the road I have been on since September when I got serious about this writing business.

Here I am again, I haven’t written a word (not counting all the scenes scrawled on sticky notes, or random thoughts slapped down in the car while my husband was talking) on my novel in an entire week. I have been very productive in other areas, but not where it really counts. Sure I wrote a lot of emails, I even thought on several important plot aspects while I ran, but I couldn’t sit for 45 minutes and pound out 1,000 words every day.

That’s the new goal. Slow and steady you know. I have always been more of a binge writer, cranking out over 5,000 words a day for a few months to get the first draft written, not to mention all those other novels collecting dust in the drawer, waiting patiently for me to figure out my method and rework them properly, then nothing written for weeks.

Consistency in all things that has been a challenge for me, since I started writing when I was in first grade with that old fountain pen my father gave me. Nothing will ever smell as right to me as that ink, straight from the bottle, then dripping on to the page from  two sharp metal tips. The ink sank in to the paper. Permanent. Every word was so important then.

So now it is 9:30 at night, way past my proper bedtime, (that is if I expect to get up at 4am and not a complete zombie.)  and here I go. But first, I have to load up the iPod with songs from 1983, you know, to get me in the proper frame of mind.

* My father passed away in March. I have been unable to get that post up, but still plan to.

A few weeks ago I found out that one of the first people to validate me as a writer, who encouraged me and gave me a place to be, committed suicide in January. A walk around Greenlake with her has been on my To Do list since 2008. Now that I am consciously dealing with how I feel, I see that I have had it pretty good for the past few years. I remember why it was that I chose to bury myself in horror novels when I was 15, fresh out of Straight. Books were then, and will always be, the best form of escape for me.