In a slump

[pegkerr]

It's been very difficult the past few days, and I'd be hard pressed to say why. Winter slump/doldrums. The house and my office are messy, swamped with papers, which always makes me wild with irritation. It's been extremely difficult to get the girls to do their homework, practice their violins, pick up their rooms, etc. Cooperation is at an all-time ebb. I whacked away at piddley stuff today, balancing my checkbook, but feel overwhelmed with all the life-maintenance stuff I need to do. Have been weaseling out of doing my workouts lately; went out and bought new aerobics shoes today and am renewing my determination to get up and do workouts, at 5:15 a.m., God help me. Tomorrow for sure, I promise.

Sometimes life is both so uninteresting that there seems hardly any point at writing journal entries and so loathsome that one can hardly bear the dreary details. Ugh.

In a funk,
Peg

Comments

[papersky.livejournal.com]

There are two things that help me a lot when I feel like that.

The first is imagining the interest that the fascinated people in the future will find in the loathsome details. So it's worth making the effort, if you can imagine someone wanting it. This is mostly for writing things.

The other, which has been called "avoiding depression by inviting dissociative disorder" is to get my characters to cope with my mundanity. Dirty laundry is much easier to sort when you have people accustomed to washing with stones in streams considering the ingenuity of a washing machine and sternly taking me to task for not appreciating it properly. (And oh my god, the beauty of that china, it must have taken some mastercraftsman weeks to make, and you're prepared to scratch it with a sponge?) Making messy piles into neat piles is easier with a comment like "Earth people are so lazy. They rely on gravity to keep things tidy."

The other thing I did that worked when Zorinth was small, was that I always got up at 5am. The thing is, nobody would do houswork at 5am, nobody would expect anyone to, and anyway, you'd wake people up, it would be antisocial. And because of the times other people had to start the day, nobody else had to be up before eight. Indeed, nobody else was allowed to be up before eight. Before eight other people were allowed to read quietly in bed without disturbing me, and that's all they were allowed to do. At eight, we all got up and had breakfast and went to school/work whatever, that's when the day started. So I had three hours there before the day started in which I could write and answer email and read usenet without guilt -- guilt? The day hadn't even started yet! Yes, I went to bed earlier, but wasn't I entitled to go to bed? I was tired! And I'd get up rested and refreshed and write before the day, children, work, all that stuff, had a chance to frazzle me.

I heard of this method of writing with small children from Rumer Godden's autobiography A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep.