No excuses

I'm stalled out a bit. I couldn't think of what to write today, which is a reflection of the fact that I haven't been writing.

I've been thinking about writing. I've been planning and outlining and daydreaming, but I haven't been typing up pages.

I'm about ten pages from finishing the first draft of Not Dead Yet, the infamous zombie story, but I can't seem to get up the energy to finish.

"I'll do it on Sunday," I say to myself. But Sunday rolls around and I type up three lines of dialogue and then run off to buy groceries, done for the day with creativity.

I have testing today, all day. I give out a test and read some instructions and sit in front of my computer for five hours with nothing else to do.

But still I don't finish it. Oh, I wrote a scene for the Rouge Wave's Valentine's Day contest, so it's not like I'm blocked.

It's more like I'm afraid to finish the script. This is the first script I've ever written on my own that I've felt completely solid about. I did everything right. Not that I don't have any mistakes or that I won't rewrite the hell out of it, but I just feel good about the story and the characters and the themes and everything, more so than I've ever felt about another full length feature.

I've written like seven features by now, but none of them make me as happy as this one.

But I won't finish it.

Because what if when I finish it the happy goes away?

What if I finish it and it's not as good as I think it is? What if I read through it to do my first edit and realize it's garbage and I have to start all over? What if all these things I think I did right just serve to prove what a lousy, uninspired writer I am and that I'm totally deluded?

So I don't finish it.

At night I think about it. I keep telling myself I'm tweaking it, that I need to know exactly what those last scenes are going to look like before I type them up.

But that's a lie. I already know what I'm going to do as much as I need to before I let the page tell me where to go. I know how this story ends - zombies on fire and a daring escape - but I refuse to get there.

As long as it's not finished it can't suck. Because I'm a pussy.

So tomorrow I stop being a pussy. I'm not afraid of zombies. Tomorrow I have a whole day to sit in this frigid room and fight zombies while my students take their standardized math test.

I prefer to listen to music but I can't listen to music tomorrow. Oh well. That's an excuse and I'm not having excuses anymore. I'll just have to hear the music in my head.

No excuses. Only writing. And if it sucks, so be it. That's what editing is for.