Thursday, October 8, 2009

Banging My Head Against the Wall

Today I feel like I'm banging my head against a wall. Actually, I've felt that way for much of this week. I've got 280 pages in the book that I'm working on but I desperately need some feedback for it. I'm trying to finish it but I feel like I'm operating in a bubble. There are plenty of other things I could be doing, other ideas to develop, while I wait for some readers to get back to me with their feedback, and yet, I find that I don't feel like doing any of them. I've been here before. When you have the time, sometimes the inspiration isn't there. When you've got the inspiration, you don't have the time.

And then sometimes I wonder what my problem is. I mean, I should be extremely happy. I'm doing all of the things that I love to do on a daily basis -- writing, performing, creating -- and yet something is missing. I get to do everything I want to do, but. . . it's not the way I imagined it would be. I guess I never saw myself doing all of this alone. I work better when I'm able to collaborate, bounce ideas off of people, hear other people's ideas, and put it all together, instead of waking up each day and trying to get excited about it all alone. I can't decide if this is a discipline that I'm supposed to be learning or if this discontent is a sign that I need to be doing something else, or at least doing it in a different way than I am now.

My life feels like a rollercoaster. There have been stretches of time where I wake up early in the morning and can hardly wait to sit down at the computer to get all of my ideas down. I write for hours without stopping and even when my husband gets home in the evening I still haven't had time to finish everything I wanted to do. And then there are days when I don't even feel like pulling up my manuscript to look at it. The hours of work I spent the days before seem like a waste of time because I'm wondering if anything I wrote will ever make sense to anyone else, or if anyone else will ever even read it, or even if what I thought sounded great yesterday isn't really the worst bit of prose ever. I guess that's part of the struggle of being an artist. It can be a lonely road.

And some days, I feel so tired of flying solo. I'm a one-woman show when what I'm craving is to be part of an ensemble.

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