i sent off a story today. it felt good. even if i don't hear anything about it, actually getting it into the postbox was a major achievement. i don't know why sending work out is so much like drawing blood from a stone. it seems to hard to get through the fog that obscures my writing and my will to write. in theory it's something i want to do all the time, but i always manage to find ways around actually sitting down and doing it. so i'm obviously not the stephen king kind of writer who can sit down at a set place at a set time every day for a set number of hours and write while listening to heavy metal (i think it explains a lot about his style, really).

having said that, the idea of that kind of routine and the thought that one can turn the stream of words on and off at will is kind of tempting. probably not very practical in terms of my personality, but having the discipline to do it is admirable.

i often think that if i had more time in the day i would write more. i need to steal time from what i currently do in order to write and i hate that. i think it's important to have winding down time after work where you don't have to do anything, but when there are deadlines and writing that needs to be done i feel guilty doing nothing, yet too tired to produce anything worthwhile. i've been on holidays for the last week and a half and i've been really busy - but not writing. this is why getting the story sent out was so important. i also worry that if i did actually have the time i needed that i would squander it.

i like cooking. cooking is a great relaxing activity for me. but only if i have enough time to enjoy it and at the moment cooking feels like procrastination. the only justification is that we have to eat, so at least there is a useful end result. but sometimes i am so eager to leap up from my desk because it's time to cook that i wonder when my priorities got so twisted around, where i enjoy the routine things like cooking where there is an element of creativity (and a delicious product) more than writing which is supposed to be what i really want to do. is it because of university? perhaps. the feeling of guilt that i haven't written enough on my thesis, and that i'm not particularly interested in it anymore. the desire to write something else. the wish that it would just end. the inklings that there is some great work in there but i can't find it under all this malaise. yeah, i think university has a lot to do with it. but then without university it would just be me and my own deadlines. and perhaps it's that fear keeping me from doing anything.

how ridiculous. but then, fear is faintly ridiculous, isn't it?