Writer's Blockade

OK this has become a little more serious than your average writer's block - it's been almost a month now, and I have several projects I could be working on, and I have zip to show for all that time.

It didn't stop me from publishing - if things were finished, ready, on the table, I put them out there. My son's book, a Quaker pamphlet that had already been written, and a set of short stories from the late fall = and I could reasonable be expected to keep myself busy getting them all out there and publicizing them.

Yet I flagged on the publicity arc too. I was into BlueSky, but stopped. Stopped on Twitter. Stopped on Insta and Threads. Only Facebook, my tried and true, where I feel some obligation to my family out there.

Also got a story in an anthology, Furever Friends, over the holidays, and it's doing pretty well I think. in terms of getting my story out there to new audiences. My story was fun to write, because it involved my own puppy who I adore and who keeps me company an awful lot of the time. This also stirred me up to contribute to another anthology which will be a number of retellings of The Beauty and the Beast; mine will be the story about Thailand. In Thailand should the beast be a tiger? elephant? something else? Let me handle it.

So I'm doing ok being a writer but I'm kind of slipping on just writing which in my opinion is more important. And I have a gut-wrenching personal situation to blame (you can scour these weblogs and I probably didn't spell it out anywhere, but that's because of the personal nature of it; let's just say our marriage is fine but things are tough). This kind of keeps me from just sitting down and being free, at night or in the day. It's just not coming, not flowing. In times like this I hit the blogs heavily, and the personal diary which I've relied on a little more lately. But what about these projects? It's not happening on them. In particular there's a novel, one which I like, stopped dead in its tracks.

I actually took some time off of door-dashing, at my wife's suggestion, and it didn't help. You'd think that with a few more hours a day, and being retired and all, I ought to be able to crank something out. On the contrary. My wife was right that I was moping around, limping, feeling old, 'bout had my back broken, etc. But that's partly because of having grown kids who are in pretty bad shape. In some ways I'm lucky and I should know it. Every time I go out I see people with true mobility issues, and at my age (70) many of my friends are meeting cruel fates which on some level they must have deserved, and same goes for me. We're all in a kind of a slump. And a deep, cold, long, dry, unchanging winter isn't helping.

There are issues associated with being a writer, and putting your thoughts out there in the world. Lately I can't even put my pop art on Facebook; I've gotten inward, non-social, reclusive. I want to come straight home, scroll around, see if for some remote possible reason someone somewhere has bought or read my book. I've actually had fun reading other books - escapism is a joy to be had - but though I get a sale once in a while I'm not really enjoying the fruits of all this hard work. It's not really happening. Not quitting the day job, which is "retired." Just carrying on, and hoping my general good spirit will ride me across the sea,