I'm Really Tired
December 10, 1997
I'm very tired today. And being very tired makes it easier to be cranky and to wallow in the mire. You know? Three stories sit on my table, waiting to be finished in the next couple days. And I have two novels to go back and tweak a bit (Lisa finished her copyedit of Gene Splice, and I need to go back and rewrite The Glamour of the God-Touched . . . the title I've tentatively chosen for the Dare book). Nearly five months of back issues of the big three sit on my desk, waiting to be read. Christmas shopping is barely started. Amid all this, I chose to stay up until nearly midnight last night and watch my beloved Louisville Cardinals get torn apart by Arkansas. Which, of course, cost me a morning writing. What was I thinking? [insert imaginary gif of me slamming my head against the wall] This is the hardest part about a partial writing life, in my opinion. Letting myself off the hook for losing time I would normally have used to further my work. It eats at me. Guilt. Feelings of inadequacy that fall through the back of my thoughts like a steady summer's rain against the porch screens. I know the room is outside, but it's still impossible to ignore the fact that the carpet is wet. Have I mentioned how tired I am? Lisa even asked me whether I was okay at dinner tonight. When I lose writing time, I get preoccupied. And I try to fill "other" time with pseudo writing-related items (today, I read my issue of the SFWA Forum at lunch). But they never work. I know in my heart that I've cheated myself. It's a caustic feeling. The flipside of believing that persistence and perseverence is the key to success is living with yourself when you don't exhibit it. To @#*% with the fact that I've written two novels this year. Or that I've written eight or ten short stories. I wrote very little yesterday, and didn't write at all today. And I live in the today. What have I done for myself lately. I'm sorry, this one's not very pretty. It's not very positive. Not positive at all. But I know I'll snap out of it tomorrow. Tomorrow I'll get up at 4:00 (or so), and I'll be down here plugging away . . . and inspiration will hit. A couple days ago I was driving into work, heading east on 46. It was a really dreary day. Cold gray overcast the color of a netscape background shrouded the sky. The corn fields had been harvested, and the stalks lay dead and yellow in the fields. Cars lined up bumper to bumper, their exhaust belching white. I was in a hurry, my standard seems to be 3 minutes late for everything, you know. It was really a crappy morning. I had just thought that "It's really a crappy morning" when suddenly, the edge of the horizon lit up. At first I thought is was a fire. But instead, it was the sun sliding up the sky, slipping through a small space between the distant black treeline and the overcast. The color was like nothing I can describe. Orange, of course, boiling orange, with a purple tint to it. Luminescent. I could imagine hydrogen/helium conversions, the color of nuclear fusion at its most gorgeous. The curvature of the atmosphere caused the sun to warp, and the clouds caught it in a strange halo, creating a velvet crown atop its squashed shape. It stole my breath. Completely.  And then it was gone, covered by the day's clouds. Nature is a performance artist.Suddenly I was glad I had been up at that hour, and at this precise spot in order to see it. I was glad I was three minutes late. I was glad I lived in Columbus Indiana, and was going to work. If I hadn't been, I would have missed it. Nature's way of showing me persistence. You knew I was going to get back to that, right? Just because it's overcast doesn't mean the sun isn't shining.  Daily Persistence is © Ron Collins |
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