Friday 18th June 2021

Today started pretty well.  I had a good night’s sleep.  I got a tax rebate in the post.  And yet, come afternoon, my mood just seemed to plummet to rock bottom.  I went from enjoying what I am writing and excited about what I was due to write today, to feeling like I had no talent and was wasting my time.

I am often filled with doubts.  I think the real magic occurs in any field or individual where two contradictions meet.  I liken it to a diamond forming.  It needs pressure from both sides.

So there is part of me that’s confident and sometimes approaching arrogant.  I think you need this sometimes to carry you through the bad times.  If you didn’t believe you were good, you wouldn’t put yourself through all this.  But at the same time, there’s a humility that realises things haven’t happened yet, and perhaps I’m not quite good enough.

And usually I float somewhere in the middle of the two.  But today I went off the deep end.  And I’m still not sure why.

There’s definitely a frustration.  I see that manifest itself in many ways.  From books taking too long to write (and not being written perfect first time) to annoyed when friends turn out to be crap beta readers, to me getting annoyed at my craft.

Usually that’s only fleeting, but today it just seemed to pull me down and I couldn’t pull myself out of it.  I was in a major slump.

As a result, I only managed to get 2000 words done today, and they didn’t feel like good words, even though I had a plan and had been excited to write them.

Still, I suppose if I can get 2000 words done on a bad day, that’s better than a lot of writers do on a good day.  And, as I keep telling myself, anything can be fixed in the next draft.

I just hope I’m in a better mood tomorrow.  I was in a good mood for everything else so I don’t think it could be any kind of chemical imbalance.

I tell you, writing makes absolutely no sense some days.

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