Oh, good grief

I was so not going to get into this stuff. But it's early in the morning, and - ah, wtf. I ain't proud.

You Are a Caramel Crunch Donut

You're a complex creature, and you're guilty of complicating things for fun. You've been known to sit around pondering the meaning of life... Or at times, pondering the meaning of your doughnut. To frost or not to frost? To fill or not to fill? These are your eternal questions.

What Donut Are You?

Vulnerability, and/or Mr Brenchley

Okay, look, this is absurd - but it does demonstrate the instability of the creative surge, the hectic imbalance of that push for the line.

Yesterday, I wrote ten pages, and only stopped because I'd decided to do so; I could have written more.

Today, I wrote five pages, and every word was a struggle.

Any time this last five years, five pages (that's, oh, anywhere between 1500 and 2000 words, depending on density of thought, dialogue, fancy layouts, whatever) would have been a really good day's work. Even a month ago, it would have been perfectly satisfactory. Today it feels like a disaster, and I have spent much of the day trying to understand what's wrong, whether I'm writing myself up a dead end, whether I'm ill, whether the rubber band has snapped and I shall falter entirely at this final hurdle, whether I'll ever write another word...

Neurotic, of course, is what we do (I was just reading where the nervous Mr Eliot met the depressive Mrs Woolf - "A polished, cultivated, elaborate young American, talking so slow that each word seems to have special finish allotted it." From her diaries, of course. 'Elaborate' is such a good word, in context). The problem is that the problem is insoluble, because its variables are inexpressible. Why did I write half as much today as yesterday? Unknown, unknowable. I woke half an hour later, but time is fluid and can be made up. Otherwise I behaved in exactly the same way: ate the same food, watched the same TV, listened to the same radio, read the same books. Worked on the same chapter, same POV, same everything. Except of course that none of that is true: I ate different food cooked in the same manner, I watched different episodes of the same TV programmes, listened to different programmes on the same radio channels, read different pages in the same books. Wrote different scenes from the same chapter, using different words. All my input followed the same patterns, but was distinct; my output, ditto ditto. And halved.

Maybe it's temperamental. I do struggle to stay equable, so as to be operating from the same baseline every day (but be aware, all my friends crack up whenever I say this, and suggest gently that I am not the most equable personality they know). Last night, though, I burned the dhal: not in the cooking, but by leaving it inadvertently on a very low heat for hours after (a thing that I do with annoying frequency), so today started with throwing it away, which was not a good beginning (tho' the pan was fine, thanks for worrying). Or no, the day had started with getting up half an hour later than I wanted to, so I was badly begun already. And I've basically been increasingly depressed ever since (yes, it's true: the nervous Mr Eliot meets the depressive Mrs Woolf right here, in me), so you could point an easy analytical finger and say "there you are, then. Problem solved. Feel gloomy, can't write." Except that it was the increasing failure to write that fed the gloom; can't really blame that on an unexpected lie-in and a saved saucepan.

So maybe it's the book. Obviously, right now I'm depressed, and anything I say is unreliable; but it is five hundred pages long, and it really may not be very good, and if my editor doesn't like it I really don't know what I'm going to doooooo; and it is very close to the end now, so maybe I'm just losing my nerve. Or my confidence. Or my ability to put words into coherent sentences, or...

[exhibits signs of manic degeneracy, in vague effort to frustrate analysts]

Ach, I'm going to have a bath and go to bed. Where my cat will continue not to join me. Sob.