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Category Archives: mala cara: pessimism

TANTRUM

I’m throwing a tantrum. I’m throwing a tantrum. It’s my first one! Yaaaaar! I haven’t written a page since my last post. That means I missed a week for the FIRST TIME and I may just miss this one too. Law school is making this hard. STILL NOT HAVING MY COMPUTER is making this impossible. Writing 5 pages at a time without the computer is like making patches for a quilt and hiding them in drawers all around the house and never looking at two at once. IT’S NOT WORKING. I “should” be writing a seminar paper (easy, just needs face time), outlining (medium and not very interesting), and a couple other minor things. I can’t get in the Garza headspace enough.

I read writer blogs and books and they reprimand you that a writer writes every day, or in little bits where possible, and it’s just NOT WORKING for me. Too much head-switching. I need blocks of time and I can’t have them. Then I feel guilty because a “real” writer would write 1/8 of a chapter on an envelope with a tube of lip gloss and I must not want it enough. Fuck. I do. I just need three hours and a comfy chair and NOT the sight of tense law students with casebooks, and that’s basically impossible right now. I want to check in to a B&B for three days. Maybe that’s what I’ll do during the break between winter term and spring. Right now, I’m just irritated.

I have a book in me. But I’m looking at it through a pencil hole in a piece of paper and so it looks small and stupid. I’m trying to make spaghetti for 20 with a machine that squeezes out one piece of angel hair at a time.

And I need to write it, more than ever. I got the monthly update on my L.A. family and they’re doing badly in the usual ways (health, money, criminal records). This book gets at some of that. It exorcises some stuff. And it’s a generation that doesn’t get much play in literature. And whatever, I just like it.

And I don’t hate law school. It’s finally getting relevant and interesting. There’s just TOO DAMN MUCH OF IT.

YAAAR. This vacation only made me see how much MORE vacation I need. Still, I’m going to write this damn book. Just see if I don’t. Just…not today.

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3 Comments

bleh

I’m not getting anything done. I didn’t realize I had school crap this week that would take time. And I’m also just procrastinating. This week is not going the way I thought it would. I reorganized the chapters, and know what I need to do. I just haven’t written anything new since Monday, and still need to do a stupid cite check for school. Which makes me feel like I only have today and the weekend, which makes it like any other week. And really, right now I’d rather watch a George Lopez DVD I have. Sigh.

I need more time. People can lecture all day about how writers write, but I’m not someone who can get up an hour early and write furiously. I’ve been producing stuff, but this is tough. There’s always something else “real” for school I could be doing, something I’m accountable to someone else for. So here I am in the middle of my “free” week, wishing I…had a free week. Bleh.

I don’t think I’m going to get another 10 pages out before Sunday. Although now my count is screwed up because I cut and pasted and reorganized, so it’s kind of meaningless anyway. Maybe I’ll give the total count a rest for a few weeks, while still trying to do 5 p/week. I don’t know. I’m annoyed, and I can’t tell if I’m pushing myself too hard or not hard enough.

1 Comment

Bleh

I don’t like my third chapter. It’s too long. By several pages. It’s top heavy. The first four pages are kind of a mess. And it was supposed to be zany and funny, but I don’t know if it is or it’s just lame and trying too hard. I don’t know, maybe it’s funny. Dan says I can’t go fix it, I have to come back to it later because I have no perspective. He’s right, but still.

Just getting it out of my system. On to chapter 4.

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