Cleaning my Slate

Can one become addicted to watching Bruce Willis movies? After seeing Loopers last week and Moonrise Kingdom yesterday, I was overcome by, and surrendered to, the urge to watch 12 Monkeys again last night. Now I find myself eyeing the multiple stacks of blu-rays kindly left by my brother and battling the urge to pull out Die Hard 4 tonight - a worrisome development, because Sunday is Game of Thrones night in this household. I shall be strong and resist. No more Brucie Boy, not for for a few weeks at least. I can control this!

Addiction is something very much on my mind at the moment because I'm slowly coming off all the pain killers that have kept me upright and functional over the past 6 months. It's a very strange experience. I completely stopped taking one medication two weeks ago, and my body tried to make me believe it was suffering shooting pains down my legs and other discomforts, but I put on my poker face, waited it out, and sure enough, four days later, my nervous system threw in the towel and everything was fine again. It's a sad day when you realise your own body has become a junkie willing to lie to you for another hit.

I'm particularly eager to be done with the last lot of pills, but have been advised to gradually wean myself them off over the next few weeks. I thought the doctors were exaggerating, but nope, it's no fun. But I'll persevere. The reason I'm so keen to see the last of them is because there's no way around the fact that these strong medications, while a pharmaceutical blessing for which I have been deeply grateful up until now, seriously affect my writing and other aspects of my daily life. They make me constantly drowsy, blunt my problem-solving abilities, and for the past 5 months, there's been a thick layer of fuzziness between my cerebral cortex and cranium. I've never been a big one for believing that you have to suffer terrible deprivations to create art, but I do find it curious that analgesics should so effectively dampen one's imagination, or at least they've done so to me. No matter how hard I've pushed my brain, there have only been brief windows of time when I've felt inventive enough to get down a few new lines. I now far better understand those stories about artists who stop taking anti-depressants when they realise the medication is interfering with their creative process, choosing to risk their own well-being rather than live what they consider a half-life devoid of artistic input. Conversely, there are others who suddenly stop producing new work when they choose to stay the medicated course rather than risk the ravages of their illness. Already today, after only a few days on lower dosages, I was back at the keyboard for a flat-out, two hour stretch before breakfast, and then another session after eating. Hopefully my brain will soon once again be unfuzzy enough for me to get back into some kind of regular writing routine.  

Since writing is itself an addiction for many of us  -  we poor scriberly junkies need regular paragraph hits to feel complete and happy, obsess about when we can clear time for our next story score when not writing, and sometimes neglect other aspects of life to satisfy the need for putting down page after page of prose - I find it amusing that what I'm desperate to break my pill-popping habits so I can satisfy another habitual craving. Of the two dependencies, however, I do think writing is the lesser evil :)

I started this year with all sorts of big plans for working really hard and producing better stories and getting them off to professional publications. I had a schedule that involved writing stories for a number of upcoming anthologies complete with timelines for their completion, had tagged a number of more ambitious stories for magazines that I would love to get into, and had even dared to put aside time for finishing my YA novel. All these plans, of course, skidded off into the concourse when I tried to negotiate a particularly sharp turn on the racing track of life. I survived, and that's what really counts, but lost most of this year to medical issues. Tomorrow, because of my time out in the Land of Not Well, there's yet another deadline that I'll most reluctantly and sadly miss because I've decided the story I've been working on isn't ready - I'd prefer not to get a reputation for subbing rough drafts rather than polished pieces.

Anyway, I've decided that all this looking backwards at all this year's lost time and lost opportunities is not only useless, but it's counter-productive and misery inducing, so today I firmly cleared the table of all but one of my writing plans for 2012. I will now turn my attention from what might have been to what might still be in 2013. With the detritus of 2012 now dumped in my wastepaper basket, I've pinned nice, new notices of upcoming anthologies with deadlines due next year to the workboard over my desk, and I've tentatively planned a more realistic, light writing schedule for the remaining two months left of this year.

Then, come the month January, I'll hit 2013, and I'll hit it hard!