If you haven't, please check out my review of Tim Stretton's The Dog of the North and also the contest entry for October, which has really cool prizes.
But I wanted to take a few quick moments here and post this before I change my mind and think this is too personal and too murky. It seems like the more serious I am about my writing, the more confident I am about it, and the more momentum I pick up, the moodier my relationship with the writing becomes. I'm not sure why that is, but I wanted to share my latest struggle.
Last week I finished a huge overhaul of Part One of Sublimation, and was feeling excellent about it. I think that was on Wednesday. On Thursday, after my EMT class part of me knew I should go straight home and pick up the figurative pen again. Part of me decided that I had hit a milestone and could afford to be a human being instead.
At the beginning of September by wife started a new job, in which she works five evenings a week. Rose and I have always been one of those annoying spend-time-together couples. Seeing each for barely a pip five days a week has been a huge adjustment for us in a lot of ways. That Thursday, I was missing her company, so instead of writing, I did a few sweet, husbandly things. Got her some warm sleepwear she'd been wanting, cleaned the bathroom, designed a nifty little candle display for our bedroom, that kind of thing.
I actually felt really good about that, and she appreciated it, and all was well.
Only.
It killed my momentum.
I've written a few more things since then, but the break in my grind-grind-grind routine was enough to knock me back out of gear. The last thing I'm going to permit myself to do is regret doing some nice things for my wife. So instead, I'm in the position of being (frankly) pissed off at my writing for even raising the question of whether or not I might start resenting being nice to my wife.
These are the times that try an artist's soul...
.Nevets.
