I have a couple of apologies to post tonight. First up is to the entire Wampler family for claiming that our beloved five-cup salad contains apricots. The truth, my friends, is that it contains canned mandarin oranges. I knew this, but apparently completely blanked on the name of the fruit, and so apologies are in order.
Second, I have to apologize to Madeleine and Ferguson (and the handful of people who have read the first half of the book) for leaving them in limbo. I didn't accomplish much today, even though I had the whole day at my disposal; while I did come up with a good alternative for an early scene that has been giving me problems, and I also wrote a couple of character profiles for some secondary characters so that I understand their motivations in the endgame, I didn't do any 'real' writing. Self-diagnosing, I think that my pernicious writer's block boils down to a v. thorny knot of separate but related problems: 1) fear of failing to produce something up to my own impossible standards; 2) fear of going through the same awful set of rejections as I did with the first book; and 3) paradoxically, fear of success and how success might change what/how I write by adding deadlines/promotion/publicity responsibilities. And if the success is big enough eventually, it could theoretically change my whole life, and while I'd like to believe that I'm grounded enough that it wouldn't particularly matter, there's no guarantee that the change would be a net positive.
Stupid, stupid. The first two issues are a matter of overcoming my perfectionist/rejection-avoiding tendencies, which I can eventually do (I finished one book, after all, and on more lucid days I feel good about this one). Unfortunately, the last issue is proving harder to talk myself out of (or at least around), since I paradoxically want to be a megastar author like Nora Roberts or JK Rowling and also want to keep my comfortable middle class life without jeopardizing any relationships with my family, friends, hometown, etc., etc. Granted, the more immediate issue is that I will starve to death (or, more likely, have to go back to corporate America) if I don't sell some books, but I'm a dreamer, and my dreams about the future could turn into nightmares.
But, they will certainly turn into nightmares if I don't finish this damn book and write the other five or ten ideas that are piling up in my brain waiting for me to start something new, and then write the dozens of ideas that will inevitably show up after them. At the end of my life, if I haven't written books and connected with people via my writing, I will feel that I have failed -- it's the single thing that I want the most, even if my writer's block doesn't make it look like that. Still, that desire is at the crux of my present inner conflict -- just saying that it's the single thing that I want the most clearly ignores other things that I want, like family, friends, health, whatever. The tug between my inner writing life and my need to have a satisfying outer life is not something I've learned to manage at all, and I'm going to have to learn it if I'm to succeed in the ways that I want to.
Anyway, this is getting way too heavy for a blog that usually only offers you a recap of who I've seen and what I've eaten every day. For that record, I only saw my parents and brother, and I had a prime rib sandwich for lunch (yum) and a tenderloin with fried mashed potato patties (double yum) for supper. I also watched some fine CBS programming with my mother, and we both agreed on the fact that Alex O'Loughlin from "Hawaii Five-O" (formerly of "Three Rivers" and "Moonlight") is v. hot -- I'm glad CBS keeps casting him in shows, and I hope this one works out for him. And now, I should probably go to bed; we may or may not be going into the heart of Missouri tomorrow, and if so, I need sleep (and maybe a tetanus shot). Goodnight!
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