Despite All Evidence to the Contrary

Jessica Gale via Morguefile

My office is littered with evidence that I'm a writer. A mug with "writer" emblazoned on it and a "Best. Writer. Ever." mouse pad (both gifts). Books with my name on the spine. I even used to have a clock until it stopped working.

Right now that seems like an apt analogy.

Lately, I haven't felt like much of a writer. I thought for sure that all this time at home would make it easier to find time to write but all the changes that have come with that time have made it hard to get myself into the writing frame of mind. My blog posts have become habit and, although I don't have a Kardashian-like following, I know there are people reading them, so I am motivated to write those. But, when it comes to my actual writing projects, I seem to run out of day/energy/motivation before I get to them.

I know I'm not alone. I see lots of other writers on social media saying the same thing.

Part of the problem is that, with online classes, I'm now on the computer all the time and so writing, once a break from the day-to-day has become one more keyboard-related task. I considered writing in longhand like my colleague Mike does but, not only has my handwriting become a mess, I'd then have to find time to get all of those notes onto the computer.

And now I've come full circle.

It doesn't help that I'm at the revision stage in nearly every project I'm working on. If I were composing instead of revising, my characters and a sense of "what happens next?" would nudge me back to the keyboard. But, as it stands now, the part of the process I like least has collided with a challenging time where my creative and emotional energies are sapped before I even open my laptop, let alone a file.

And so I'm working on finding avenues in, be they guilt (leaving the file for my work-in-progress in the middle of my workspace where I can't ignore it), other writing tasks (promotion of existing works, a search for an agent to represent the work I'm revising), and creative approaches (sketchnoting the tasks or steps I need to complete for each project). Then there are the old stand-bys: goal-setting and deadlines.

Progress is slow, but it's happening (that guilt thing was pretty powerful). Next week's break in the online class action might offer me both the opportunity and the downtime to change my mindset from creating classes to re-visiting characters. Like any visit, once I get there, I always want to stay a little longer.

Now I just need to decide which road to take to get there in the first place.

Geralt via Pixabay