Viva Las Vegas

I’m dashing off to the aiport in a bit for a noon flight to Las Vegas. I’m going for just a night and will be home in time for dinner tomorrow. My great friend, the Australian romance writer Lilian Darcy, is there with her family now and as I don’t get to see her often, I jumped at the chance to meet her for dinner and spend an hour or two tomorow morning by the pool discussing books, agents, publishers and careers.

I’m not really packing anything, heels and a top for dinner, a swimsuit and wrap for the pool, a book to read on the plane (Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister). Lilian’s one of the friends I treat to tea every year when she’s able to fly to the US for RWA’s national conference and definitely one of the most gifted writers I’ve read.

Time with my writer friends is different than time spent with non-writer friends. Writer friends can be work—together, we usually discuss work–writing. The business of writing. The art of writing. The deadlines, the edits, the advances, the industry that seems to be if not in perpetual crisis, then perpetual change.

Unlike many of my successful writer friends, I feel as if I fight my stories more, wrestle with the process more. Lately, when I write, I feel like I’m wrestling with one of the dinosaurs in the new Kong movie. It’s really hard. I will do any and everything to put off those first fifty sentences. Well, I’ll do anything but write and workout. I’ll do all the easy stuff. Answer email, pay bills, clean house, pluck eyebrows. But motivating myself to workout–and then actually do it–has become as impossible as sitting down and just writing a new scene.

I was reading through some of my writing craft books and in one, the one that deals with writing from the left side of the brain, it says that resistance always means something. Yes, it means I dom’t want to do it. Why? Why don’t I want to do it, because another part of me really wants to do it. Another part of me is so frustrated with Resistant Jane that it’s crying with frustration and gesturing pleadingly to just let me work.

It sounds crazy and sometimes it feels crazy. Maybe I need an even stricter routine where I have fewer choices and less time to think, and reflect, and resist. I’ve got to stop analyzing and asking so many questions and just do it.

Right?

Right. And I will. As soon as I get back from Vegas.

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