This is my second blog post and the topic is writer's block. But it's not so much to do with my blog, but my job. I am employed as an author. My nine to five job is writing a coffee table book for the 100+ Club, a free social club exclusively for people aged 100 or over. (www.facebook.com/100PlusClub <-- Please become a fan!) I am in the final stages of writing the book and my days lately consist of chaining myself to a desk at my local library and researching the last 100 years of Australian and world history. That part is fun. The library staff all know me now, I jam my headphone in my ears, take notes on my iPad and I'm allowed to eat and drink in the library (except for the fact I wear Invisalign braces, but that's a whole other story.)
What is getting me down is when I come home, iPad laden with facts and figures and fantastic little tid-bits of knowledge to add to my manuscript. I open my laptop, click on the Word document titled 'Manuscript', bring up the day's document on my iPad and sit blankly. It is getting increasingly harder to force myself to get into the frame of mind to write my manuscript. From day to day and mood to mood, I write differently. It is hard to force my writing to sound seamless when reading back. Sometimes, and maybe it's because I'm my own worst critic, I read my own writing and it feels forced and contrived. Nobody who has read my work ever comments on that, in fact I only ever hear positive feedback, but I can definitely tell when a sentence has been inserted at a later date. Or maybe I just remember, because I did it...
I need one of those memory flashy things from Men in Black and then I could read my own writing completely subjectively... somebody make that happen?
Miss SAMawdsley xx
