Fried -- A Confession

Some of you have had an awful lot of me lately, by phone, because I've been obsessing about work and housing. I got the work sorted out, and now I've got the housing sorted out, with unexpected suddenness, but still, good. (Oh, and I didn't mention my dog bite and my dad's surgery scare in the middle of all this, or the weight gain or the leaking toilet.) Anyway it's all been rather a lot the last couple of months.

And now I've got to move house. I found another place with some acreage (dog heaven, people!) and ten minutes drive from the new gig. It's a small house. It's in Virginia, out on the edge of the Metro area, close to Dulles airport. There are all these new subdivisions with big boxy new houses and jogging paths with people jogging on them (seems to be the Spandex capital of the world), but from the little kingdom which I have just rented, none of this is visible. Nothing but a big meadow and woods and a dirt road.

These practical preoccupations have been eating up so much of my brain and energy that I just don't at the moment know what to do to get my various writing projects going again -- I confess to feeling a loss of momentum, a loss of focus, and the usual great swarm of self-doubt about why even bother. All this will not quite make me quit, but it does have other pernicious effects.

Am I blegging for an encouraging word? No, just for anything nifty and practical that I or anybody else can use. It's really just like I said. I need to reconnect with all this stuff I've been writing (not just here) for the past year, and it's a little overwhelming, the quantity of it, and the wretched notebooks too. And just at the moment I don't know how to do it. Anything that can get me started thinking again will save me a few weeks of beating up on myself.