It’s October and I’m about to roll into the sixth month of the longest writing/creative dry spell that I’ve ever known. Even the year when I had two sprained shoulders and could only type for fifteen minutes at a time before my hands went numb, I still managed to write a 60,000 word novel.
There have been some false starts; an outline and a few pieces written for a collection of essays/stories on my weird experiences as a freak magnet and all the narcissists I end up with in my life, but no matter how I tried, I could never make the stories come out sounding anything but bitter and weirdly resentful.
After that I thought, hey, maybe I could go back to making something with my hands. But then I’d look on Etsy and there would be thirty people already selling metal nose-warmers or macrame black-out curtains and I would talk myself out of even trying. There really is just too, too much of everything, not all of it good.
I also seemed to convince myself, during this period — because I’m usually never one to keep my opinions to myself — that nobody really wanted to hear what I had to say. I’d find myself writing posts or comments on social media and then deleting them. Nobody cares, I’d tell myself. I’d sketch out a piece for my blog and then bail on it, convinced that nobody would read it anyway and someone else had probably had that idea and already written about it, and done a better job than I could anyway.
This started as a book review of