Chasms

Tomorrow is Christmas Eve and I'm sitting here with the wind coming and going and the boys going about their business and shot of bourbon next to the computer and the weight of a frustrating week behind me and I feel the need to write, the urgency to get words into print but (for a few days now) when I sit down thoughts evade me.  My weeks work is a series of near starts and abrupt stops accomplishing nothing but a growing sense of despair digging a deep chasm between myself and my writing.  I have over come this chasm before, my writing history is a maze of bridges slowly zig-zagging forward in very tight turns bringing me to yet another chasm and another bridge to build.

It is all well and good but sometimes I am weary of the effort it takes to pick up, drive forward, and lay words onto paper.  Some writers talk about the seemingly effortless process of writing, how the work produces itself while others compare a good days writing to letting blood.  For me it is a combination of each, the chances I get to write are marred by early morning exhaustion or the sound of my children in the background and words come slowly if at all.

Today I feel like I should be reflecting on Christmas but I haven't the energy to dedicate to the day in writing just now--perhaps tomorrow, perhaps the next day, perhaps not at all.  As a husband, father, carpenter, and general man of the working class I welcome the brake from the mundane, the daily grind, a chance to retreat into my family and let it all slide away for a day, or two, or three.  As a writer I long to capture it all in words, preserve it, explore it, contain it forever.  But usually I find myself standing on the edge of a chasm with not way across and no sight of the ground below.

Slowly and painfully I begin building that bridge, one drop of blood at a time.