What the Hell?

Here's what happens: I make a pact with myself that I'm going to write everyday, build up a good month's worth of material and then fall off the wagon. I don't make writing a priority. Well, I do for a while and then I don't for a longer while. I get scared. I wonder if I have it in me to put it all out there. My fear is irrational, but it is there and it has a hold on me. I start to write something and end up questioning and criticizing it before I'm halfway through. Everybody does that, right?

I have a writing assignment. It's a one off I sent over to E, something I needed to get off my chest so I could sleep. The draft is crap, but E is encouraging me to make it better. Part of me wants to never touch it again, but I have to stop doing that. I keep writing "good beginnings," but I never do anything more with them. Maybe because I don't think I know how. How am I going to make two hundred words that sort of suck into eight hundred words that suck less?

Today, instead of writing, I napped, snacked, surfed the interwebs, watched people walk their dogs, did some more spring cleaning, watched the original Yours, Mine and Ours (I have a big crush on young Tim Mathieson) and finished reading Love is a Mixtape. I could have found some time in there to write. I think, read and talk about writing more than I actually write these days. All that thinking, reading and talking is not doing me any good. Dp I really want to be a writer or if I just want to talk and think about being writer? That's what E asked me yesterday. I never really do anything with the stuff I write, so do I really want it? Do I want to be a writer or do I just want to write from time to time and leave it at that? I don't know anymore.