And The Grind Grinds On...

Don't get me wrong; I love writing. There's something about letting your mind sort of slip away and tap those keys for an hour or two, before coming back to yourself and seeing something come to life before you. Sometimes I go back and re-read what I just wrote and think Wow, did I write that?

Sometimes I even mean it in a good way...

Other times it's... well, it's not like writer's block. Everyone knows what that feels like; it's just that sometimes the writing is leaden, uninspired and dead, and you feel like you have to kill everything you just did, excise the diseased sections, just to get past it.

When I was writing The Quintessence Machine, I hit a spot like that. 274 pages of uninspired, uninspiring, paint-by-numbers text, because I forced my way through it, hoping that, by some miracle, it would suddenly come to life in my hands; I was some keyboard-bound Doctor Frankenstein, screaming Give my creation Liiiiiiiiife!!!! In this scenario, I'm not sure who my Igor was...

In the end I killed it. Hit delete. Didn't even save a sneaky copy somewhere, hoping to save time by using cut'n'paste to baste the old into some new framework. Took Ol' Yeller out to the woodshed, stuck the pillow over Jack Nicholson's face, whatever movie-based analogy you wish.

Did it hurt? Of course. Two months' work down the tubes, and nothing to show for it.

Except, of course, the knowledge that sometimes you have to take the hard route, and the comforting feeling that I learned something.

This weekend was a bit like that; 5000 words of Sinterglass Road written on Saturday had to be expunged on Sunday. But it's worth it. And whether or not I (or anyone else) ever sees a copy of that book in their local bookshop anytime in the future, at least I have the satisfaction of knowing that I'm being true to myself.

And I guess that's why, even after a weekend like this one, I'm still happy, still hopeful, and still writing.