This is a little how I feel today. Easier to say what I’m not doing. Like today. I’m not revising. The memoir. Now sitting at a whopping ninety-some thousand words, gone over and gone over and revised and revised, and not done.
Exercise doesn’t even interest me.
Today I feel stuck. We could, perhaps, blame it on the dark of the moon which always tends to drain my energy, or on ennui–one of those great words which we so seldom have a chance to use–and which is more than likely partly true, although not true of the story.
In the memoir, I’m constantly doing.
If this memoir were not a labor of love, or labour, the British spelling, which, one hopes, makes it more respectable, elevated even, to work hard; make great effort, perhaps I would have tossed it. Or maybe not. There’s a “bull-headed”–as my dad used to say–quality about me that rarely allows me to stop once started.
Ursula Le Quin cheered me some. I am not granite and should not be taken for it. I am not flint or diamond or any of that great hard stuff. If I am stone, I am some kind of shoddy crumbly stuff like sandstone or serpentine, or maybe schist.
Or not even stone but clay, or not even clay but mud.
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