THE INFERNAL INTERNAL VOICES

Words, words words, swimming around my head but never, it seems when I try and record them on the page. I seem to have a constant conversation going on between this part of me and that part of me and when it gets complicated there’s about four of us.

It quite often takes me a couple of times for my loved ones to say something before I can assimilate it enough to respond. My daughter is constantly telling me I don’t listen to her but it’s not the true, I just have to stop the internal dialogue for long enough to allow the words to penetrate.

Unfortunately, this internal dialogue has taken a negative bent of late. I started lockdown with such high intentions. Planning to have a first draft ready by September. Easy-peasy, I thought - seven hundred words a day, weekends off, that’s around fifteen hundred words a month. I’ve actually managed ten thousand words in three months and I kept to my seven hundred words a day for the grand total of three days.

I’ll not bore you with all the lovely things I’ve been berating myself with but sufficed to say that I have succumbed to writer’s block. These words you are reading are the first I’ve written for two weeks. What have I been doing with my time? Not very bloody much!

I’ve lost faith in my novel, I feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of excellent writing out there (I am reading a lot about four novels a week). I think this might be too much reading, I’m not sure. I think that even when I finish how will I ever find a publisher in this climate. So I avoid, I use subterfuge on myself, I procrastinate. I basically torture myself. It isn’t fun.

But.. one thing I have learned is that writing for me is like the weather. Sometimes there are long periods of sunshine, sometimes there are four seasons in a day and sometimes there’s a storm where all I can do is hold on to something solid in an attempt to not being blown away. The thing about weather is that it always changes and I think for me, right now the storm has finally abated.