Walking on Eggshells

I wasn't sure if I was going to have a blog entry this week.  As melodramatic as I felt ending my last entry the way I did, it was genuinely what I thought at the time.  I mean, what's a writing blog when I can't get myself to write?

Thankfully, I'm doing a little bit better now.  But I couldn't have said that last night.  The only reason I'm typing this right now is because I had an epiphany in the shower.

...yes, I get a great deal of my writing ideas in the shower.  I've been getting jokes about that for as long as I can remember.

To rewind a bit, last Thursday, I had what felt like one of those moments of clarity you hear about in fiction.  In a movie, it would have started with me freezing all of a sudden (probably dropping a glass of some kind for extra comic effect), my eyes springing open wide as I got hit by a whole bunch of ideas all at once.

Thursday and Friday, I hammered out a few pages' worth of details on something brand new.  By Saturday, it was gone, and I spent Sunday and Monday struggling with everything.  I felt like I'd gotten back to what I wanted most, only to have it dashed away.  Last night, I sat here staring at the screen again, forcing out a few paltry sentences on places in the world, trying to make things work and feeling like this new idea was going to end up like everything else I've worked on lately - crashing and burning as I failed to figure out how it was supposed to go.  I didn't know if I would even try working on anything tonight.

Then, as I said, shower epiphany.  A song I'd been listening to while working out (if you've never worked out while listening to Pandora's "classic metal" station, I highly recommend it) wormed its way into my head, and I started applying those ideas to my new stuff.  And now, two and a half pages of history and mythology later, things have worked out pretty well.  Knowing where the world came from and why it's the way it is means I can figure out the rest of the story much more easily than when it was a blank slate.

I'm happy that things are going better, no doubt there.  What bothers me the most, though, is how much it affected me to have things go well and then crash again.

For years, whenever I'm having a bad time with my writing, I'm grumpy and depressed and feel like everything is horrible.  When my writing isn't going well, nothing in my life is going well.  The past few weeks have been the worst case of that I've ever had.  And it's really starting to bother me.

I hate the idea of so much of my moods and my life being based on how my writing's going.  Because that's going to make the bad times even worse, even harder to get through.  And I know I'll have those bad times again.  It really is a question of when, not if.  I don't want to walk this road again every time things get difficult.

As seems to be a common theme in my blog these days, I don't know what to do about this, and I'd appreciate any advice.  Even if this is just one of those "Congratulations, you're a writer" things; that doesn't mean I'm not going to try to counter it.  :P

Thank you all for the kind comments on my last entry; I replied to them last night when I was still feeling horribly down about everything, so anyone who gets notified when they get a response got something really cynical.  >_<  I don't know if I'm fully back to believing in myself yet, but I'm clawing my way up again, and that counts for something.

Finally, I hope that I won't fall like that again anytime soon.  I have enough to work on that's going well right now that I can switch between projects when things aren't working.  I did some good work on a plot on Saturday and I think that one's finally ready to be written.  (Amazing what a genderswap can do.)  I also figured out that one plot needs to be fully detached from the world I put it in, but haven't started in on that one yet, because now I need a new world.

Not yet sure how much I want to talk about any of this, but I'll try to figure that out in next week's entry.