Friday Forays in Fiction: Writers Write

Every since I signed up for Script Frenzy a couple weeks ago I've felt a Freakout slowly building up steam inside me. My story writing muscles have atrophied over the past several months. I've not written a word of narrative or dialogue since NaNoWriMo ended the last day of November. I've not even been reading that much of it either.

I have been getting my story fix by watching videos while crocheting.

I have been wearing a mental hairshirt and swinging razor tipped straps of shame over my shoulder trying to flay the laziness and fear off. Its not working.

I continue to send for more DVD from Netflix and the library as well as stream off Netflix. My brain is engorged with the stories. My dreams are movies made of a mishmash of the most recent videos I've watched spiced with scenes from my life past and present and pretend.

Sometimes as I'm waking from one of those mini-movie dreams I see a story whole, beginning, middle and end in a series of images but long before I'm able to get my netbook open it has faded.

Fifteen or so years ago when I saw the first laptop featured in a catalog I fixated on it as the solution to all my writing woes. If only I had that portable wonder I would always be able to capture those fleeting ideas, always be able to write on the fly whenever and wherever I happened to be. I pictured it beside me as I slept, rode in the car, dined in a cafe, lazed in a park, daydreamed in the library....

What I pictured has materialized but the wonder tool has been used for creative writing only some minuscule percent of the time I have it open. Fifteen years ago I never imagined all the other things I would come to depend on it for--from indispensable to distracting, from useful to essential to compulsive.

Games, movies, news, research, IM, email, photos, ebooks, blogging, social networks, LOLcats, record keeping, shopping... What did I leave out. I'm sure it was something. I'm so dependent (addicted?) to my netbook I feel bereft when I have to leave it behind for an hour to go to the dinner table and if I had my own home I probably wouldn't. But it isn't my writing that I'm missing when I'm separated from it.

I feel like a fraud.

Writer's write and I'm not writing.

April 1st is breaking sound barriers in its approach.