The Head Is Empty
I’m a big believer in taking a short break between writing books…when possible. Not a long one. Nope. See, if I take a long one my latop becomes a vehicle by which I endlessly play that tile game and nothing else. Too much time away from writing makes it really hard for me to get back to it. More than likely this is an offshoot of my general laziness and desire to waste as much time as possible during every 24-hour period.
A short break is different. It’s those few days I take where I’m not plotting or writing dialog or thinking about characters or doing anything else relating to a particular book. Those days where I do fun and frivolous things like, oh, the laundry. Where I look at everything piled up on the dining room table with a what the hell is that stuff look on my face. Where I pay the utility bills before they get cut off. Where I pick out an old fav book and re-read it. Where I order all of those books from Amazon that I’m convinced I missed while on deadline, never mind the fact I have 300 unread books stacked up all over the house.
Basically, I veg because my mind is blank. I have a project I want to work on, even tried to sit down and look at it yesterday. Couldn’t do it. There’s just nothing going on in my brain except for those dashes from the Peanuts cartoon. That’s all I’ve got right now.
Monday will be better. That will be about a week post-deadline, and I’ll be ready to go. I hope…
July 18th, 2008 at 9:34 am
HelenKay, that’s exactly how I felt in April after taking my Master’s exam. I had two days to recover from the written part in time to take the oral part of the exam. After passing both of them, my mind just went blank. The bad thing was that I still have 6 weeks of my final class in my Master’s program to complete before I was all done and could graduate. Luckily, my brain started working with enough time to get my final paper written.
I’m sure you’ll get back into the swing of things. Enjoy your weekend!