Preemptive Retaliation

So I have a confession – that post I made last night was ALSO part of a procrastination. I started it because it was almost eleven pm on a Monday night and I had not yet written anything that day, and I felt as though I could batter out some feelings rather than batter out some prose. I don’t think I did very well on that part, so here I go – let’s try again.

I have a cool desk. It’s big and it’s wooden, and it has a wooden riser for the screen, and it’s crowded with all these little things that I have around me. Wireless charger for my phone and watch, a wireless games controller, a mi for talking with friends, a light that’s from three homes ago, a camera, a Steam controller, a Steam Deck, notebooks – at least three – a reproduction of Scott’ Hutchison’s notebook for Pedestrian Verse, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go which I think I will forever keep on my desktop as a point of pride, or principle maybe, a growing collection of RPG books that could do with a better home, and a plant that’s been dying for longer than it’s been alive.

And, on either side of my keyboard, I have my novel. On one side I have the green book filled with plans and notes and thoughts and desperate pleas to make this work. On the other I have the printed out first draft, which I have annotated and marked and scored through.

The annotated manuscript has been on the same page for so long that the white paper is filthy with coffee cup rings, wine spills, pakora sauce smudges. It’s deteriorating, becoming one with the furniture.

I am procrastinating on writing it. I am procrastinating on writing it right now. I know that there’s no rush to get it finished, I know that when it is done, eventually, maybe, when it’s done it will exist in the world, and it will exist in the same manner it would have if I finished it a month earlier. But, still, I have this guilt inside me. This desperate anxiety. I’ve written about it before and I definitely will again – but I’m driven by this purpose. Sure, the novel will get written, but to do that I actually have to write it. I have to write it, and not ignore it to play games or watch TV or bunk off and writing a stupid blog.

Though, saying that, there was a moment today… Jack was at my computer, hoping to play a videogame and hopping up and down with impatience as I finished washing the dishes. As he waited he spotted my notebook and flipped it to the back page. He lifted a pen and began scribbling on it. “Look! I’m like Daddy!” he said, and pulled the grumpiest face I’ve ever seen, and wrote his little heart out.

Does that make me a writer? I think that makes me a writer.

The novel will get done. I just have to write it.