Writing every day is my own choice. Nobody is forcing me to sit and await inspiration-strikes or dig for previously unexplored relics. I can’t even blame NaNoWriMo because nobody made me sign up. I thought it would be fun. I wanted to be surprised.
I’m surprised all right. I’m surprised by how wrung out I am by twenty-two consecutive days of writing. It’s not as though my whole day is spent here, but it’s a commitment. It’s one that does not come naturally to me. I had relied on the irrepressible urges to write – if I don’t write I talk to myself, and I know which one is more socially embarrassing. A flare erupts up top and I sit on the cat, or scooch her away, and a flurry of activity results, almost effortlessly. Then I sit back, astonished that my day has been thus interrupted.
But NaNo. No. No flares, lately. Flares have departed. Flurries diminished. I feel underfed, wrung out like a toothpaste tube. It’s not pretty. I’m… well, I was going to say I’m pustular. Nobody needs that mental image. But I feel like a leftover Halloween prop that a horse sat on. At the end of the month, I’m counting on my body’s healing instinct to restore my pre-NaNo dimensions and patina.
Fingers crossed. Too stubborn to stop now. There have to be more words left in the old fart.
PS: I don’t really sit on the cat. That was a lie for dramatic effect, in case you worried. She’s spoiled rotten and I didn’t want to admit that part. If she steals my desk chair, I use the exercise ball. And the top photo was taken at a public garden, where I like to walk my old camera.
Mental Dust-Bunnies 