Today is the exact middle of NaNoWriMo and I’m not caught up. On the other hand, I’m not as behind as I was yesterday, so some progress there.

I’ve lost my bluetooth keyboard that I use with my iPad. It is not a crisis because I still have the laptop, but if it doesn’t show up I will have to get another one.

It has been a week of little problems and upsets and it has not helped my emotional state to remind myself that I’m living the dream here. But the truth is that I am living my dream and I’m grateful to be able to do that.

I am in that phase of my writing that comes up every now and then when I read other people’s beautiful finished books and compare them unfavorably to my own writing. But I know that this is just the way the Enemy chooses to torture me this week. The Enemy is strong this week, murmuring dreadful things into my ears. But I will not cry because I’m not a baby. I’m a writer.

Speaking of the Enemy, I am fascinated by how writers refer to the part of them that nags and tells them that they aren’t good enough. Dean Wesley Smith speaks of it as Critical Voice, which is a fairly neutral descriptor. Steven Pressfield calls it Resistance and he has an almost mystical relationship with it and the Muse, whom he invokes with this prayer from Homer’s Odyssey.

Chuck Wendig doesn’t name it but he has invocations against it. One of my favorites starts this way:

I am a writer, and I am done fucking around.

That which has prevented me lingers no longer. I am wind and storm and lightning and I shall huff and I shall puff and I shall blow all the barriers down. Then I will drink whisky made from the fear-urine of my loudest detractors and find power in their disbelief.

I don’t have time. I make time. I reach into the universe’s clockwork brain and I take whatever time I jolly well need. I cobble time out of sticks and mud and the finger-bones of naysayers. I am a motherfucking time wizard and with a wave of my pen shall create universes to conquer. Pockets of possibility. Born of my desire to have them made.

From the Inkslingers Invocation by Chuck Wendig

I would love to quote the whole thing, but that wouldn’t be fair. Take my advice and read the rest. He has two more as well.

I may try my hand at writing my own invocation to ward off the Enemy and entice the muse. But first I have more important things to write. If you are writing this week, I wish you well and hope that your antagonistic force has been gagged and tossed into the corner while words flow from your fingers.

Write strong my friends!

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