LIke Clockwork

It's like clockwork -- the MFA brainfreeze. The deadline is upon me and that is the cue to come to a complete creative halt. The new writing is coming one slow and painful page at a time, and it feels completely flat and uninspired.

I am falling behind on the reading, not even done one of the books and without a single idea for the first annotation, let alone the second. And all the while, I have put everything else on hold because I feel as if every minute of every day should be spent writing. I know this to be a bad strategy. Tomorrow, I better factor in a few breaks. I'm putting the writing down for the evening and going to do a reading blast so that I can at least break free of one task -- an annotation.

There is something comforting in knowing that this is just the way it happens each month, and it is no indication of anything. It's just a little hump that I need to get over. So, so predictable. You could set your watch by it!

In the end, the reading gets done, the annotations get written, the new work gets completed, and usually I manage to knit a few rows in between. In a few days, I'll be ready to move on to the empathetic questioning to deepen the draft, and suddenly, ahhhhh!

One day I would love to edit a volume, filled with the work of all the writers I know, about why, oh why, we write.