Breakfast Musings

I'm sitting here eating my morning oatmeal, cruising email, websites, and my favorite blogs and trying to get my derriere in gear to start work on another project. (*Derriere* being the perfect word since the next project in the queue is partly set in Paris and has lots of fun French phrases sprinkled throughout. Title: IN A PARIS MINUTE.

This weird and aggravating place I'm in is not becuse I don't have plenty to work on. There are two completely drafted manuscripts waiting for rewrites, research, future ideas to outline, but I'm in this awful abyss after sending off one project and trying to get past the inertia to begin again.

This drives me crazy. I was determined last week that I would only take a day or two off and then get going again. I DO have a goal to get a couple more full novels subbed to publishers before spring hits. Never seems to work. It's like I mentally shut down. Just want to rent about five chick flicks and veg out in front of the TV.

I am easily intimidated by other's success and talent.
I am easily overwhelmed by the sheer mental and physical work writing is, especially because a couple of my critiques on the PARIS project are not particularly kind.( I mean I know there are problems but they could have been *nicer*, right?)
Maybe it's pure laziness.
Maybe it's fear.

Or all of the above.

So I make these lists of everything else I got accomplished while I wasn't writing just to make myself feel good. Visits, phone calls, bills, shopping, reading (got through about 10 books in the past week. Some good, some ho-hum), helping kids with homework, cleaning, knitting a blanket for the premie hospital project our church is doing, making homemade chicken soup.

I need to call my mother, too.
She probably thinks I've dropped off the planet.
I have.
It's called the writer's abyss. I'm at the bottom.
Wave if you can see me.