S & M & Me

At last I'm free!

For a second, or even two.

I don't know exactly how it works for other writer-type people; but me, when I'm enmeshed in the writing process--whether for creative or corporate purposes--I tend to obsess about it.

It gets ugly. I wind up thinking about the work roughly 70% of the time--whether I'm playing with my daughter, wrestling with my habitual plaguing insomnia (which, peculiarly, comes in handy whenever I'm visiting my mother in Florida, since I end up in approximately the right time zone for once), and generally at any random moment when I'm not thankfully engrossed in some adequately-absorbing television or reading material.

Otherwise, I worry covertly at the words I've already crafted--whether written down or presently extant only in my mind--like a recalcitrant cold sore in the lining of my mouth, which my tongue cannot resist jolting into electric agony every time the pain consents to subside to nearly manageable levels. My cursedly efficient memory allows me the leisure-cum-torture of mentally placing a comma, just so, in between phrases of my mentally-viewed text; then removing said comma; then inserting it once more, or replacing it with an inexplicably more appropriate semi-colon. I stutter over the same virtual ground over and over again, retracing phrases, sentences, paragraphs. Sometimes I even dream about it, which just goes to demonstrate the depths of my literate lunacy.

Dean finally informed me that he's accepting the story I wrote for his spec fic anthology. (I wrote one and ended up hating it; wrote another and liked it passably well; hammered out a third on the knife-edge of deadline and finally submitted that one.) Which means I can finally stop thinking about those three troublesome paper-offspring and start obsessing about the other things I'm currently working or waiting on.

Oh, but this writing taskmistress is a bitch. And I love her despite and for it.