Writers Block is a muther fucker!

I wasn't sure if I was going to tell you all this, but Pep has writers block big time.  When you get it you try to stay calm, you try to convince yourself that you don't have it.  But as the weeks have gone on I find that I simply can not write!  I can force words on paper and it will suck...it will be a series of meaningless words that do not touch me, but that finish a story already begun.

I started writing my Halloween story, the idea is sublime (at least in my own head).  It's mapped out in such a way that it's a no brainer...and yet I have written the same five sentences over and over for two days.  The first draft I read to my 16 year old daughter--who writes also--and after two paragraphs she just huffs in annoyance and says, 'Why are you writing all of that?  Why do you have to use all of those big words, and go into so much detail; you know your readers do not want to hear all of that!'  And then she says, 'I would have just said this...' and the 16 year old proceeds to break it down into the exact words that I had been searching for.  I'm nodding my head.  Yeah, that could work.

This is writers block!  When your 16 year old listens to two paragraphs of a story that you've been struggling with and tells you in 5 or 6 lines what to write and it's perfection!

And Wheels of Steel?  It's already finished in my head (the stories come to me at night while I'm lying in bed--the missing part, the elusive ending).  My fingers are poised at the keyboard...but if I have to write the same sentence over and over a million times then it's not happening.  So I've been doing other things, having fun and not thinking about writing--though it is a distant, haunting thought in the back of my head that one day soon will have to be faced.  Today was that day.

Pep had a mini breakdown as I sat behind the lappy (still unamed...though I'm kinda leaning towards Nancy or perhaps Samuel L) as my palms began to sweat, and my stomach knotted and then the tears began.  A person like me, that has to write in order to keep my thoughts in some form of semblance, can not imagine a time when the words aren't there.  Because should that happen...well I won't have writing as my form of 'therapy'.  Then I just might need 'real' therapy.


When my father was in the hospital preparing to die, which incidentally happened one day after my birthday a year ago October 10th, he said, 'You love words.'  Sometimes he would just wake up, eyes focusing on me and say things like that.  Sometime it was 'hello beautiful', and luckily for me, once it was 'Happy Birthday.' so that I got to hear him say it one more time.

I smiled and nodded.  'Yeah, Daddy, I love words.' I see words in a way that alot of people can't understand and even being a writer I can't put into words.  I see words in my head; floating on them, burying myself into them.  I love listening to other languages so that I can feel those words--I don't even care if I don't understand them!  When I string together random words and I make people cry, laugh, horny, happy/sad...how can you not love words?

And I lost that for a while, not the love, but the ability to arrange them, weave a story using them.  And then I heard a song called Nightfall.  It's by Fila Brazillia.  It has the type of repetitive beat that allows me to write to so I began to listen to it as I struggled to find the words.  I got to three minutes into the song, it transforms at exactly the 3 minute mark.  I stopped what I was doing and I listened.  And he sang exactly what I felt about words!   He says the colors, but for me it's the words...

Thank you Fila Brazillia because I tapped into my own fear, panic and love of words to begin tapping out the Halloween story.  And I feel it again.  As long as Nightfall is streaming through my computer I can feel my words again.  NIGHTFALL~FILA BRAZILLIA

Here is a preview of the story.  It is literally 2 pages so is very short.  But if you want to see it here it is; I would show you the crap I wrote before it but I'm too ashamed.  LOL.


THE SHADOW PEOPLE