A new year in the space future

As I write, I have bursts of great productivity, and then I have moments where the words...just...don't...come.  Intertwined with this is the self defeating idea that I simply have nothing of value to add to world of the written word. My ideas are worthless, my sentence structures wretched and simplistic, and ultimately, everything is unoriginal. I am not a special snowflake; I am, in fact, a hack. *sob*

And this insinuates itself deep within me and debilitates me and my writing. It's a long, hard battle to overcome this and keep writing through it. I mope, I stare at the screen, I drink, and I let it sit, thinking perhaps the ideas just need to marinate a bit more. It is not productive. It hobbles the creativity.  As a result, I don't sleep because I'm obsessed over how little I have to offer anyone.

And then, something happens, and I break free from this funk, and I write--like can't get anything else done because there are so many words demanding my attention. They drag me out of bed in the middle of the night, and I sit hunched over a dimmed computer screen until five or six in the morning. I drag my notebooks around and jot down random notes and sometimes pages of writing that I have to drag back to the computer to tweak as it goes into the system. And these are gloriously exhausting days.

These are the triumphant days (and nights). I feel proud of what I write, even if I delete it--and that's hard watching days and hours of work simply go away, disappear into the ethers, or get cut and pulled into a separate "this is okay and I'm not ready to throw it away" document. This is a trick I developed in grad school when I had phrases and sections that I loved but that my advisor felt perhaps did not do credit to the overall project. As a result, I have a document with phrases of quotes from Through the Looking Glass and lines similar to "Flaming globes of Sigmund!" among others. Seriously, I wake up some days and I have no idea what the phrases mean (Scott can attest to this as he has asked a few times only to receive a blank look, as if to say, "Don't you see it? Don't you get it?"--note: he does not see it nor get it).

And so, this brings me to my point. 2013 and 2014 were rough, but in all of that, they set me on a course that I have slowly followed, persevering and eking out words here and there. At the end of 2014, I could say that I had followed through on one of my resolutions. I only hope someday others can see what was dreamed of in the low days of 2013 and fought long and hard for in 2014.

Here's to 2015 and all that it may bring!