When did work ever become an addiction...?

[desperance]

I honestly thought I wasn't going to write anything more tonight. Even apart from all the stupid distractions of stupid people being stupid, I finished a chapter earlier today and my head hurts, inconsolably; that ought to be enough. Also, I have homework to do: a book on climate change to read and digest, and several papers on geoengineering and why it might be a really bad idea. I thought I might just sit in my comfy chair for an hour and do reading, and that would absolutely count as working.

But. If I go to bed without at least starting the next chapter, I won't start it when I get up either, because that first leap is always harder first thing, I need to be oiled and warm and ready. So I have mixed myself the perfect Bloody Mary, which is comfort-drinking in this house and ideal for headaches, and I seem already to have flung a few words at chapter whatever, without any grief at all.

It's funny, I've been through years and years where it was sooo hard to get myself to write; this last couple of years, the hard thing seems to be stopping. What changed, 'zackly? I dunno, but it might actually be the internets. My prolixity coincides more or less exactly with my broadbandedness, and hence my discovery of LJ. Can it really be that the sudden awareness of community, this shared writing-space dimension, this constant conversation about the thing, has reawoken my earlier amateur pleasure in the job? Before it was my job, nobody could stop me writing; for the thirty-odd years that followed, it was really hard to get me started. And now - well. Here I am. Here I go. Again.

Comments

[mizkit.livejournal.com]

Teh intarwebs and the LJ community are a huge factor in helping me sit down to write every day, I think. I mean, I'd do it anyway, but it's so lovely to sit and bitch and natter and chat and be encouraged by others. It makes a deeply solitary occupation so much more sociable.

Good luck with getting the chapter started tonight!

[desperance.livejournal.com]

I do think that is it, exactly. I am still solitary - observe me, here I sit, and even my cat has abandoned me! - but yet I am socialising in one part of my multitasking brain, I am chatting with you and wafting words at who knows how many others, and it's kinda like pulling an oar in a galley rather than sculling alone. Or something.

And - hee! - I have just written "I am Cinna the poet! I am Cinna the poet!" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvius_Cinna), thinly disguised as "I am Chung the messenger! I am Chung the messenger!" - and no one will ever notice but me, and it doesn't matter, because I know...

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Certainly, I like the sense that I can talk to someone -- in a controlled way -- if I want to without having to break the typing rhythm. But for me there seems to be an endorphin thing going on, too. Writing makes me happy (sometimes).

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Yup, writing has always made me happy too. Sometimes. But the writing-engine has been a cold claggy thing for decades, hard to start and hard to keep running - until these latter years, where it's oiled and smooth and eager. Something changed.

[pennski.livejournal.com]

And long may it continue!

[julesjones]

I need to be oiled and warm and ready.

No comment...

I think that one of the things about LJ is that it is a social interaction that has greater immediacy than putting something in an envelope and posting it, but that does not have to be in real time. So you get something of the boost that comes of sitting in the bar at a con, hanging out with your writing friends, without the trouble and expense of actually going to a hotel for the weekend. I'm sure that for some people (including myself some of the time), that helps to get around the Monday morning feeling a plank screen might otherwise engender.

[julesjones]

*Blank* screen. What a very strange thinko.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Hee. I dunno, I rather value 'plank screen' - that sense of a positive bar, "thou shalt not pass", utterly opaque and set there deliberately against you. The prevention of writing as an act of will.

Also, I love 'thinko'.

[freda-writes.livejournal.com]

Wow, I can only hope that Broadband magic will soon work like that for me too! Wireless waves of inspiration going straight into the brain would be even more helpful!