Gray

Gray in body and mind. Exhausted after class last night and under siege from the thick, wet wool of clouds that are wrapping themselves in long, invading tentacles all over Seattle this afternoon. It's a day to just go home and burrow oneself in flannel sheets and take up extreme slumber. But the 20-foot-tall writing mistress dressed in leather and metal coming through the fog and reminding me I owe about 1,666 words today and about 4,900 this weekend. What's pleasantly shocking is when I walk away from the keyboard after a writing session with the fact I wrote about 7-8 pages. Granted, it's all rough, but it's down. No one said the first draft has to sing. It just needs to be a map of where I want the final draft to go. Last night, we worked on dismissing the critic, who sits to await the chance to march on literary ambitions the same way Godzilla strolled through Tokyo. I'm already there, which shocked the hell out of me, considering how much the inner critic was so present with me up until a couple months ago when my therapist and I deduced the source of the critic. And like that, the nagging and shrillness evaporated. Now, it's a voice to push and write and honor a commitment to something that, damn it, I've been meaning to do for so long.

So, the lesson is, if you need to have voices in your head, make them work for you. Not against you.