what frustration feels like

In the approximately 18 months I’ve been writing this blog of…whatever it is, I’ve accumulated 31 essays or starts to essays which haven’t been published or weren’t worthy of being finished; 16 unpublished poems; three different memoirs which will never see the light of day; a rough draft of a play; the outline for a novella; a political satire; three chapters of a science fiction story blended with politics; and three dozen idea starters plus a dozen or two “snippets” to prime the writing pump. This doesn’t count some old blog entries which could be polished up and republished, journal entries which shall remain private, and older pieces of writing which predate using OneNote as a writing notebook.

Today I spent two to three hours writing what was supposedly going to be a ranging, breezy, entertaining look at my relationship to time and a look at time itself. When I stopped I had a pedantic, trivial piece of crap such as I would’ve written on deadline for the newspaper and never thought about again. “Disappointing” is when your realization is a pale copy of your dream; “abject failure” is when your beautiful idea is born as devil-spawn and requires an immediate stake through its heart.

No wonder I mostly put up photos.

2 thoughts on “what frustration feels like

  1. I fully relate to this. This is exactly why I challenged myself last year to write 52 short stories and publish them on my blog (warts and all). Sometimes it’s in the finishing and moving on we find a way to ignore that inner critic and just create.

  2. I really admire your 52Stories, 52Watercolors, etc. I just can’t produce that much that quickly. You are a model for me!

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