writing
Saturday night seems the contemplative night for me. Warren is off playing Star Wars Galaxies and I’m sitting in front of the laptop feeling like doing something creative. I started writing stories at around the age of 14 and I made up stories in other forms for years before that. My best friend and I in grade school made essentially a radio play, with a murder and suspenseful chases, all with sound effects and dialogue. It was great fun, even if it probably sounded terrible on my hand held tape deck. I used to make up stories for my sister as a bedtime thing and that was fun too. There was also a terrible lying streak when I was teenager, where I would make up all sorts of wild stories about myself, to seem more glamorous, but I’ve grown out of that now. I’ve been able to see that I’ve had plenty of real adventures, without editing my life.
So, writing.
I’ve always written stories, from scripts for Battlestar Galactica, as a pre-teen, to fan fiction for Buffy the Vampire Slayer lately. I have several serious fiction projects sitting on my hard drive, but there is a big block stopping me from continuing. It’s hard to explain, but if I sit down to write, I often feel as if it’s a waste of time, when I could be doing housework, laundry, bills, etc and I find it hard to value it enough to be serious about it, even when Warren reinforces the idea that he thinks I’m good enough to get published if only I would finish works and send them out. I need to get past this idea that I don’t deserve to succeed at this and that time spent writing is time not working at home or getting paid out in work force, rather than time spent perfecting my craft.
I wonder where that came from? The guilt of writing when “work” could be happening, because no one ever said that out loud to me, that’s for sure.