Best Laid Plans
Posted on October 11, 2007
Filed Under suburban joys, snark, writings, bat-ass crazy, writer's block |
How to cope with writer’s block? Both Ron and Bono agree that writing about the mental constipation plaguing me is a sure way to regain the free flow of ideas. I am so fond of Ron and have quite a few U2 songs on my iPod that used to work before I ran it through the wash, so I’m willing to give it a try.
As soon as the kids went back to school, I was going to begin pumping out at least five hundred words a day, five days a week until finishing the novel I started last winter. I planned to be flexible. If Monday was a good day and I churned out over 500 good words, keepers, the stuff of brilliance, then Tuesday could be more relaxed, a time to write a casual blog posting, an opportunity to read the brilliant witticisms of others. This didn’t seem too tall a task when presented to myself at the end of August. My self was entirely on board with the agenda, until that first Monday.
Monday came and went. Monday was full of the nuts and bolts of existence, grocery shopping, jogging with the dog, a shower, laundry, returning fifteen phone calls about the school field trip and the PTO pasta social. There was a mandatory room parent meeting at the school in which hot topics like peanut sensitive snacking and siblings at holiday parties were discussed. By the time I sat down at the computer, there was an hour remaining before the kids would be home and demanding snack and needing help with homework and piano and a ride to soccer practice and so I squeezed off a blog posting and called it a day. Monday came and went and I never opened the necessary Word file to even run through cursory revisions.
So, after the failure of Monday, Tuesday began with an underpinning of pressure and a low-grade stress headache. I can’t find my muse when sorting through anxiety and self loathing and so I headed off to the gym to do some weights (because I will not gain five pounds this Winter) and then I had team tennis practice and then, really, by the time I dropped off the fliers for the school Halloween party, spent an hour scraping the old paint off the side of the house and took a shower, there was only an hour of kid-free day left and I found myself reading some blogs and blasting out another short post. Tuesday had come and gone and I never even opened the necessary Word file to run through cursory revisions. There were no new words on the page.
Wednesday rolls around and I have a morning tennis match that is over by 10:30 but then the other players on my team take the court and it’s nice to stay and watch and support them and there’s a lovely lunch provided afterwards and these women are my friends and some of the only people I see socially on a weekly basis and I refuse to feel so damn guilty about taking a few hours a week and devoting it to competitive team tennis when competitive team tennis is the one thing I do all week that I truly, truly love.
You could say that competitive team tennis is really the thing here, the glaring conflict that is taking up a lot of that precious kid-free time that I need for writing (I already hear this from My Better Half), and you’d be right. But where else in my life am I approached by perfect strangers who just want to compliment my performance and pat me on the back. Tennis is the ultimate confidence boost. I feel 20 feet tall when I leave there on Wednesday afternoon. Win, lose or draw, it’s incredibly cleansing. So it’s Wednesday, it’s 12:30 p.m. and I still need a shower and the leaves in the yard are accumulating and making the driveway slippy and the bathroom needs a good cleaning and soon I’ll hear the bus pull up and out of its folding doors will explode the energy of two who will need help with their homework and piano and, of course, the requisite snack. And to complicate things, my neighbor BB, just called to ask if I could come over and watch her two toddlers while she takes her older kids to Tae Kwon Do because, I guess she thinks I have nothing else stewing and, when her au-pair is unavailable, I’m the go to girl. And I don’t mind, really, I don’t, except I’m trying to write here. But then there’s tennis and BB must think that since I’m off to the courts two times a week, I’m really just looking for things to do with the rest of my day.
So tomorrow is another day, a Thursday. Thursdays are tennis-free days. I will not eat, shower or jog with the dog until I get some new words on the page. I swear it. Really, pinkie swear, cross my heart and hope to die, I will write tomorrow. (Now you watch, I bet you either O and G will come down with a fever or croup or the stomach bug because, well, the best laid plans…)
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