Weather and Writing

At 3 a.m. i woke up from a very loud noise and these were my thoughts: 1) We are getting bombed. 2) It is Judgment Day. Uh oh. 3) Is my husband okay? I sat up and looked around. Hubby was okay. I looked out the windows, finally waking up and boom, there it was again with a flash of light. Man the thunderstorms here are intense. They have woken me up before but this one was different. Or perhaps i just wasn't coherent enough today to realize what it was. Usually i can roll over and go back to sleep. It continued throughout the morning into the afternoon which was a good thing. I finally got caught up on work since i couldn't distract myself with the house or anything else.

I've been feeling like a bad writer and sometimes i really am. Recently i wrote an article for a magazine that was assigned and the topic less than interesting since it really is just an informative piece and doesn't leave much room for creativity. What doesn't help is when you set up an appointment to interview a group of people, you drive an hour to get there getting lost twice from their directions, get there finally for the people to not be ready and ask you to leave the questions with them and they will fax the answers to you. Okay fine. They finally fax the info for it to be not really what you asked for or needed and leaving you one day to write the dang thing. The magazine sent it back asking me to rework it...mostly the information i was given (how can i help that??? grrr). So that means i have to reinterview the people who were so difficult to begin with and wait for their answers again (they still haven't returned my phone call today). Of course the article sucked. It's half their fault and half mine. As my personal assistant/editor, i.e. my husband, says the book reviews i write show that i'm a great writer, but the miscellaneous ones just aren't good because my heart isn't into it. It's hard sometimes. Book reviews are easy for me...well they are actually hard for me to do, but mostly because i put more into them because i know more people are going to read it, and the author of the book will read it, and because it's a piece of art i'm critiquing. It's important to me even if it doesn't pay as much as the others. And it's fun to be creative with them cause there's room to play with language in them. So why can't i do that with these boring topics (i really do mean boring too)? I guess i'm just going to have to make these people answer my questions, and i'm going to rewrite this thing putting my heart into it. Yeah right. I'm going to get the dang thing done and then wash my hands of it. I really should work on my own book but i'm just so unmotivated or too busy. I want to know it's going to get published and have a deadline to get it done by. I don't function without deadlines cause i can't get started if i can't procrastinate. That may not have made sense so i'll show my working process:

Day 1: get assignment with deadline.
Day 15: Deadline is 5 days away. I pull out material needed to review. I review it and start mulling over what i'll say in my head.
Day 18: Deadline is tomorrow. Uh oh. Stress. Why did i put it off? Ugh, the blank page is stressing me out. Okay i just have to get something down. A draft at least. Okay draft done. Wow, the draft really sucks. That's okay the page has something on it. Okay, deadline is tomorrow. Stress out. Drink coffee so i can get more stressed out or at least be hyper while being stressed out. Rework the article once.
Day 19: Spent day and night working on frantically. Hate it for the first half of the day. Aw, there...great i like it now. Send it off on time. :-)

If i start the actual writing process i guarantee all my writing would suck. I need pressure. I have proof too. When i was in college and would start writing a paper or start studying for a test a week or so before it was due it would suck and i'd get a bad grade. When i wrote the paper two days before, and spent the next day editing (much like i do things now) or cramming the two nights before i'd get A's. I just need pressure to get anything done.