A river in Egypt

Writing has been much on my mind of late, as always. Unfortunately not much has been hitting the page. Yet again life has jumped up and stolen all my free time. At the moment I’m living a Chinese curse – May you live in interesting times. For me interesting is not the half of it right now.

Three months ago my car was set on fire in the driveway of my home. Somebody carefully places a plastic 7 Up bottle on the bonnet (hood in America) and set it alight. I’m pretty sure I know who it was and the Gardai pretty much agree with me. So far, so bad.

Eleven weeks ago my business premises (a shop called Yellow Brick Road) went on fire. Twice. In the space of three days. The second time the Gardai declared it a crime scene, not surprisingly. Fortunately it was quite obviously an electrical fault that caused both of them. Otherwise I’d be writing this from Mountjoy jail.

So, over the past three months I have done almost no writing. But I have done quite a lot of thinking about writing.

So I got to thinking about writer’s block and thinking about writing rather than writing has to be one of the most effective definitions of writer’s block I can think of. I would love to hear other writers’ definitions and anecdotes as WB is something that every writer must fear, if they think about it at all.

But you’ve got a great excuse, I hear you say. There was the car faire and the Gardai and buying a replacement car and the fires in the shop and putting your business back together and all of that stuff.

And you’re right. All of that is valid. But it didn’t eat up all my available time, it simply swallowed all my head-space. I could have sat down ad wrote a short story or maybe even a book review on several occasions during my interesting times. But the point is that I didn’t. Even when I had the time and a touch of motivation. And I have to take responsibility for that.

I don’t claim to have WB but that may be because I am in denial. What I am going to do, however, is take responsibility for the fact hat I haven’t been writing and say that it is one hundred percent my fault. I am in control of my life. If I want to write I will.

Look, Ma, I’m doin’ it right now.