AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

I'm frustrated.

I've had a lot of distractions this week ranging from "Oh look, there's a hole in my sock", to a work meeting that made me take everything said personally (even though I don't think I was the culprit that brought on the conversation...who knows. Communication there is less than zero...), to "Oh dear, One of the cats I'm pet sitting  just decided to have a seizure on my watch."

Needless to say, I've lost my focus this week. I was trying to explain it to my husband Andrew last night and only got more frustrated. It's not his fault that he's my biggest fan and has something positive to say about anything he reads of mine. And I can only imagine his own frustration with me as he listens to me rant on and on about how I'm never going to be a writer or accomplish anything. In those moments, I get so lost in what's really bothering me that I don't even pay attention to the words coming out of my mouth.

But that's what's really bothering me...the words, or rather, the lack there of.

My brain is so filled with story upon story just dying to get out and it all makes sense in my head. But my job, as a writer, is to portray each story to the best of my ability. And I need words to do that. My struggle is that I focus too much on trying to input the right words the first time I literally stop writing for a few seconds, over-thinking the next sentence and the one after that and the one after that. (I'm even doing this right now...) If I could just spit up everything all at once and then go back and make changes later, that would make this whole process so much easier. But I'm so intent on making it perfect the first time that I lose part of the story.   Sometimes, it's like my hands are numb to typing the ideas and portrayals of what's really going on inside my mind. They just freeze up. Andrew told me last night it's because I've put a mental block up.

Damn you for calling me out Andrew! Damn you!

The worst part of hearing this is that it's true. I have put a block up and I could offer up excuse upon excuse as to why I've done this to myself and future career of being a writer, but I have nothing. Maybe it's because I'm trying to fit 30 years into one book of stories and I've found, no matter how uneventful or boring a person's life is, 30 years is a whole lot of information.

So I'm overwhelmed with the fact that I'm actually challenging myself to write, not one, but many memoirs. I can't seem to get organized. I will be writing one story about a time I went to the movies with my Dad and then suddenly think about an ex-boyfriend and lose the sweet affect of representing a fun outing I shared with my Daddy as a little girl.

I wish I could find a way to shut my brain up. It's so random in it's thinking and often makes me feel like a crazy person screaming as loud as she can into a pillow. (Which I am not above doing by the way.)

At any rate, I have set aside a huge block of time today to simply focus on my writing with no distractions. (And by "no distractions", I mean as little distraction as possible with 6 pets and a work at home husband whom I love very very dearly.)

So, hear it goes....wish me luck.

"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."

Ernest Hemingway