Between Me, the Clock and the Pen

The house feels stifled.
Poisonous and thick. I keep opening windows, when I probably shouldn't, and lighting incense and attempting to blow out the cobwebs, but the real cobwebs are in my brain.
The last two days, I have forced myself to write for an hour apiece.
I remember when I was the most productive, I would come home from work and write for an hour no matter what. Sometimes it was longer. Sometimes I could spend all sixty minutes staring at the page and write one word and then delete it. Sometimes the hour would be up, and I leapt out of my chair and far away from the computer. Sometimes two more would go by without me noticing.
The beginning is always the hardest.
I have written three pages in these two days. They are all starts to short stories that I can't seem to follow through. A woman wakes up in the hospital surrounded by confusion and covered in bruises: TRITE! BORING! LIFETIME ALREADY MADE IT INTO SIX DIFFERENT MOVIES.
A man stalks his wife's student through the night. She is one in a long line of rapes he commits annually. BLARGH SO DUMB! TOO SEXY! TOO SENSATIONALIST!
A girl finds her grandmother asleep on the porch covered in bees...
DUDE SERIOUSLY?
WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN SMOKING?
It's so frustrating.
I let my sister read the first hundred pages of my book last week, and all she did was tell me how bad it was.
The perspective is the same for all four characters, none of which are worth caring about due to the writing of the first twenty pages, which is the most important, as it is when you hook your readers. There is a reference made to a song, which apparently our Dad uses in one of his books (which I've never read).
Awesome.
Nothing like two years of work to get skewered in an afternoon.
I keep following Neil Gaiman's blogs and twitter posts, because I think he's got the right idea.
I like his writing, and I would like to marry his style with Margaret Atwood's, throw in some Bret Easton Ellis and a bit of my own, and present that to the world.
He writes about writing, which is helpful.
Except for one thing.
He has time.
I don't know how they do it.
Stephen King boggles my mind. He had two jobs, two kids and a dumpy trailer back in the late seventies, and he churned out Carrie like it was child's play. Sure, we can all remember how he began submitting short stories when he was in his teens, and he used to keep his rejection letters on a nail above his desk to remind him to keep going, but where the hell did he find the time?
Maybe I need to start doing speed.
J.K. Rowling was on the dole. Her kids were in school all day. She had six hours every day to devote to dreaming up her ode to magical England.
I want to find out how you write when you're busting your hump at a forty-fifty hour a week job and coming home to a filthy house and a depressed husband.
Do you take the time to yourself despite how selfish it makes you seem? Do you realize it really is impossible to do everything, and just shelve the whole writing dream until everything calms down? Because that one doesn't work.
I've been doing that for sixish years now.
A trail of scribbled paper followed me from san francisco. There were coffee stained poems and love letters, essays about youth and sex and feminism. They clung to my elbows and nipped at my ankles while I packed boxes and sent out resumes.
A love affair. More poems. Long journal entries all about how confusing the launch of a new relationship is. More essays on feminism, body image, whether finding your soulmate changes you. More boxes, more moving. More resumes.
A hard time. No jobs. No money. Sharing a two bedroom mousehole apartment with my sister. I built fortresses out of panicky journal entries. What was I doing? Was this how it was supposed to be? Should it ever be this hard just to exist? Let alone create?
Putting the head down. Working working working. Getting to a better place. Finally having more time to write. The book. It happens. Fast and furious and full of glory. One hour at a time. Then the wedding. Lost in planning, money, moving to a better apartment. Nobody comes knocking. Not at all.
Then the ambition returns. I send out stories to magazines and contests. I talk to friends about launching my stories online. I tell my Dad about how excited I am to be on the forefront of this new media for writers.
I win none of the contests. My Dad gets my friends to launch his writing online instead. He tells me enthusiastically that he will be on the forefront of this new media for writers, and I want to scream, curl up in a ball, and give in.
The editing of the book is the last thing I can think of. If nothing else it will give me a place to go, a destination, a light in the tunnel to work towards. I have faith that my story is good, that I will outstride my Dad's writing with my modern take on classic themes. My job is changing. I am taking on more responsibility, more hours, but it means more money, and the husband just lost his big paying job, so I take it, and the editing takes a back seat, but at least I'm still doing something, still moving forward. Still a writer.

Except it doesn't feel like it.

What do I do? Did I miss my chance? Do I need to shake things up? Quit my job? Move somewhere new?
I've worked so hard to finally get to a place where I'll have time to write, and now that I'm here I'm churning out garbage. How do you get past that, Neil? How do you tell your brain it's okay that all that stuff kept you from writing for so long, but now it can come back and bring all the ideas it's been hiding from you this whole time?

What does Margaret Atwood do when she's overwhelmed?

Bret Easton Ellis is selling out. There's talk of an American Psycho II...
Stephen King is still sequestered in his bat mansion in maine, tocking away on his computer, earning everything he deserves.

Today, I start with an hour on the clock...and what comes next?
I have no idea.