why am I not writing?

Subtitle "Why am I whining instead of doing something?"

So I've had these bits and pieces of stories that I think are A story waiting to come together and I can't seem to get re-started. Prior to "the bad spring/summer" when work ate every aspect of my life for several months, I had started in on something and was feeling pretty good about it. It was a shitty first draft, but a shitty first draft is the first step on the road to...successively less shitty drafts. If you're a good girl and very patient and keep drafting and eat all your vegetables, you might even end up with something readable in the end. It can happen.

Anyway, it was going to be a challenge. All I had was an image, and that always means the story is going to progress a bit more slowly until the characters start to show their personalities and motivations and situations. Something about a woman who missed her ghost. She'd only just realized it was gone, that she'd neglected it, that she couldn't seem to find it. (Okay, there are obvious psychoanalytic connections here w/ me and my muse or whatever. Nonetheless, something about it feels good and right and I swear by all that is good and holy not to write directly about my own life. Far too boring...).

I started to get the character before work came in with its gaping maw, but haven't been able to go back to the story since. Then a couple of weeks ago, I just got the sense that this story was about betrayal. Self-betrayal? Betrayal of others? Usually the two go hand in hand. So now that's simmering in the back of my head. Goes w/ the ghost image I had. There's an obvious betrayal there. (Stop squirming, you psychoanalysts in the audience. I see it. I do.)

So I think I'm ready to start writing again now. It's funny, and perhaps reasonable, that 5 to 6 months of having to work serious overtime might burn you out and turn you into a couch potato--more like a slightly burned, bitter-tasting hash brown, really--for a few months. Maybe I'm being too hard on myself on that front. Anyway, I think it's time. My loyalty to work has been, um, challenged lately, and it's time to be loyal to myself again. I've been serving a fickle master for too long. So instead I'll follow my own interests a bit more aggressively for a little while.

Much less fickle. Mmm.