Writer's Pox

     Χαῖρε! Greetings. I got through the first week of the semester and am on to the second. Today I had breakfast at the caf at 8:00 and traditional grammar and usage at 9:00. I have New Testament Greek at 1:00. I think I'm going to love Mondays.

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     But not everything in my garden is sunny. If you haven't noticed, I've been rather inconsistent with my posts lately. Some might call it lazy, some might call it writer's block. I'm going to call it writer's pox. I'm suffering from writer's pox. Again.

     Writer's Pox: an affliction characterized by difficulty in putting words down either in pen or pencil or on the computer, often accompanied by an acute sensation of doubt about whether or not one really wants to be a writer

     All the writing advice books in the world will do me no good if I'm not writing. Polished stories and poems don't appear overnight like dandelions. So I crank out words that mean nothing to me because they're so wrong--the right ones slip through my fingers like thrashing, slimy eels.

     *I want to write for the love of it, but I've forgotten how.

     I'm afraid to go to the creative writing group on campus because I don't have anything written.

     I've been keeping away from The Well because I don't have anything written.

     I'm afraid to read past chapter 2 in Let's Write a Short Story, because Joe Bunting the author said not to go on unless I could commit to writing a short story this month and submitting it for publication and post my resolution here with a link to his page (he said it in the book, not to me personally), and I don't know if I can.

     While my real writing lies in shambles, atrophying away, I'm journal-writing, letter-writing, word of the day sentence-writing, and observational writing.

     I don't now if you can have therapy during an illness. You certainly can't do physical therapy during a fall in which you break a bone. But therapy seems like the most appropriate word for this "other" writing I'm doing now, and I'll need a lot of it in this war against the writer's pox.

* Jeff Goins describes what writing for the love of it looks like in his Writer's Manifesto. You can get it on Amazon for 99¢ or subscribe to his newsletter and get it free.