Ever since the recent crash of Diary-X, I’ve been meaning to back up the blog. I normally write my entries right in the blogger browser, first and only draft. Until tonight I didn’t have a single entry in my posession. Now, this is a good thing to do. Certainly smart and productive and worthwhile. But it’s especially productive if it helps me put off any real writing for one more day.
I’ve wanted to write since I first learned my letters. And have I ever really written anything of substance that I wasn’t graded on? Nope. Not counting the hundreds of pages worth of blog writing I just saved. I started this current blog a year and a half ago. I started an earlier blog a year before that. In the past two and a half years of blogging, with the ostensible goal being to get me closer to my goal of writing books, I have not gotten one bit closer to being a writer. In two and a half years some people can write four books, and I….I have written nothing.
A friend of mine approached me recently to work on a book project that I’m really excited about. I know there is a need for the book and it could do so much good. So does that get me off my butt? Nope. Does the chance that this book could actually, seriously, get published motivate me into overcoming my fear. Not a chance. I don’t know what to do with myself.
All day long I’ve felt the computer calling me. Yes, yes, I said, I’ll get to you. I’m folding the laundry right now. I’m working on my craft book. I’m eating dinner. I’m playing three hours worth of computer games. I told myself I’d write late at night once Bear went to sleep and I had hours of quiet and the house to myself. Did I? Of course not. I backed up my blog. So now it’s 3am, I’ve got a tutoring session tomorrow afternoon, my blog is nice and secure, but one more day ticks by with me having written NOTHING.
I’m seriously pissed at myself. I’ve come up with so many excuses: I can’t write while I’m drugged up, I’m too young, I don’t have enough to say yet, it’s so hard to get things published – what’s the point of even writing it if it never gets published?, I’ll never be as good as I want to be.
I really think that writing is my life’s work. I do think I’ve got stories to tell and an interesting perspective. But I also think that I’m scared immobile because this is what I want so badly I don’t know if I could stand to fail.
I have got to suck it up and find a way past this.