I can already tell that the pressure to produce scintillating tales of adventure and insight on my blog every day is going to be a challenge. For anyone who might stumble upon this, you'll catch on right away. Inconsistent writing. That's me. Pretty typical cycle where I am concerned. I get all excited about some kind of project or lifestyle change/addition, try it out for a while, sometimes not even that long, and then I lose my enthusiasm. To write the blog, read the ayurveda book, finish knitting the scarf, start knitting the hat, learn the new monologue--it's all too much effort. Not that I think I'm the only person living on the planet who succumbs to this stop and start existence. It's like a long bus ride, isn't it? You get going, and just when you're momentum has really started to build, the bus driver has to pull over at the next stop and everyone sort of deflates. It takes effort to get going again. And then there are those bus rides late at night, when no one's waiting outside, and everyone on the bus is getting off at the same stop, in front of the Top Pot. You coast on by and all the riders, including the driver, have this little smile on their faces. "Oh, yeah...we're cruisin' now." Rarely do my new found hobbies, big ideas get to take that bus trip. And, no, I haven't started boning up on my math skills so that I can start studying for the GRE.

What I have begun to do is write a play.

I know, I know. Every actor and his motherunclebrothersistercousin is trying to write a play, or book or whatever. I was inspired, though. I've had ideas before, and thought "Oooo, I should write something about this. Yeah. I should." And I don't. Or I do and as a result I have a bazillion random starts of stories, scripts, plot ideas, what have you scribbled in various notebooks from college to now. This is the first time that I have made a concerted effort to finish what I've begun. And, up until last night, I was having fun writing this play. I cared not whether it was going to be good or bad, I simply wanted to get it out. My entire being experienced a lightness and joy as I went about my day, high on the release of artistic expression stored up from lack of use. 25 pages, I've written. That's more than I've ever done on any kind of creative writing, either as an assignment or for myself. Granted, it's dialogue, which takes up a lot of space on a page, considering the formatting. STILL!!! TWENTY FIVE PAGES!!! I've even made little rules for myself. No showing to anyone before I've at least finished a 1st draft. (If someone read it and told me it wasn't any good, I'd never finish it.) No going back and revising before I've finished the 1st draft. I read writing advice somewhere that suggests plowing through without editing or revising, so that you get it all out. It's too easy to go back and get bogged down in working on the first part and never getting around to finishing. I am afraid of falling into that trap, hence the rule. Though, I'm not sure if I can stick to it. That inner critic person, the one we all have? Well, she's started to open her big, fat, joyless mouth. Which is why I am beginning to deflate. This morning has been worse. I was watching myself write as I wrote new pages and the entire time I was commenting to me on how crappy it was. How trite, done, over done my ideas are. How after-school-special. Immature. Just plain dumb. I liked it better the first week, when I didn't care about the good or bad.

I'm aware that this is a very normal part of creating. And now that I think about it, that realization does provide some amount of comfort. I know that as an actor I generally get to a place during rehearsal where I am certain that every choice I make is a disservice to the script and a waste of everyone's time. I am a bad actor and I don't deserve to be here. It passes, and I stop wallowing in self-pity and begin to do the work, again. So, it would make sense that today, on the 25th page, that I have officially begun the descent into the murky waters of beating myself up with my own self doubt. It's my challenge, isn't it, to push through this un-fun moment and finish the script? It might become fun again, who knows? I'd like to find out. To see what's on the other side of "I suck".