I rather like this idea (seen here, here and originating here) of a weekly mea culpa of writing progress, so I'll temporarily lift my head above the blogging parapet.
This week I have added three handwritten, narrow feint A4 pages to the previous week's four. The essay project is so, so much easier to write than the children's novel. Rather than forcing and scratching around for ideas I find myself overwhelmed by them. One thing leads to another. Thoughts endlessly branch and digress, leaving me anxious that I'll never have time to follow them all. I'm trying to tell myself to be calm; that if my brain can teem today, it can teem tomorrow. Too much to write is a new phenomenon for me. And yet still I fear sitting at my desk and actually picking up my pencil. Why this resistance? Will it decrease or will every day be a battle against myself? I think it may the fear of actually doing something (as opposed to endlessly imagining and talking about it) and being faced with botched reality instead of basking happily in the glow of the idealised work I am going to write, soon, tomorrow, sometime.
Today I have taken advantage of a rainy morning and the children at dance lessons to start typing up some of my scribbles. And in doing so I see that the essay I thought I was writing is really three different ones, none of which is finished or remotely polished. I'm trying not to judge and just to type it out. I'd like to have one finished essay up at Topography by this time next week. But even as I type that the hubris hits me. Really, you think you'll have that muddle sorted out in a week? My inner censor is on good form today.
