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I’ve been dealing with some… stuff lately. I’ll expound upon it later but right now, I’d like to kick it off with this little headliner.

Yes, I know. The standard “good little writer response” to the phrase Writer’s Block is supposed to be: There’s no such thing.

Yeah, well. It still happens, whether or not you think it’s a real thing, writer’s block happens.

At first, back when I was young and dumb and thought I knew everything (life was so much simpler before adult realities like bills, weren’t they?) I thought “writer’s block” was just one of those creative “I got nuthin’” moments. It happened a few times and I would just move on to a completely different project, confident that as I was drawing or whatever a muse would come around, beat me on the head with a creative stick and then I’d be back to my writing self again.

Then I got pregnant. The day the test came back positive, the desire to write just… died.

I joke that my muse threw up her hands and said “I don’t work with kids,” and then left, but the truth of the matter is that I really did not want to write. I couldn’t comprehend writing. I would sit down at my computer and stare at it. I would hold a pen in my hand and just doodle on the page, but not write a single word beyond a grocery list.

I literally had no desire to write.

No. That’s not accurate. I wanted to write. I needed to write, but like the last few Mercurial Mondays that I’ve posted lately, it just wouldn’t come. It was like flogging a dead horse.

It was almost 4 years before the dam broke and I was flooded with words, drowning in them, deliriously swimming and splashing and throwing them about like a kid in a bubble bath.

Now it’s dried up again, and I don’t know why. I’ve tried the advice columns – music, working out, shaking up your gig, sacrificing a platypus at high noon on a pyre of burning asparagus, switch to another project, notecards, meditation, blahblahblah.

I push forward, and it’s like trying to move a mountain. I ignore it, and it burns in the back of my mind, just enough to be irritating. I focus on something else and it’s heartbreaking to the point that it feels like I can’t breathe. I feel tired and dry and… dry. So very dry.

They say it’s all in the mind. That if you focus on it, it becomes like mud that grabs your wheels and won’t let you leave but draws you further in.

It’s maddening and terrifying and exhausting and empty.

I don’t want to go another 4 years like this.

Neil Gaiman (is there anyone who doesn’t quote this guy?) says sometimes you just have to stop and refill the well.

And that’s fine and dandy.

If you know where your bucket is.

I seem to have lost mine, and that frightens me a great deal more than anything else right now.

Check out the Insecure Writer’s Support Group to see more writers dish about their concerns, their solutions to various problems, or just a general fear of spiders.