When life gets in the way of writing (#amwriting #frustration #inspiration)

Last weekend I started working on a new book, a light-hearted, smutty story that’s set in the fictional world of my friend Larry Archer. Larry has a series of tales set in Las Vegas. These stories feature a common set of characters who hang out at a strip bar in Sin City called The Fox’s Den. His books are heavy on the sex and a bit light on plot, but their humor and “anything goes” attitude really appeal to me.

Larry and I have been talking about writing a story together. Unfortunately he’s a lot faster writer than I am! He finished the book (80K words!) before I could make much of a contribution. Meanwhile, I had new inspiration. I sat down to work on “Hot Brides in Vegas” on Sunday. In five hours, I wrote nearly five thousand words.

The thing is, I didn’t want to stop. The juices were flowing, the words were rolling, the ideas were tumbling onto the page—I hated to close Word and go make dinner. I was totally buzzed. Unfortunately, I have a real world responsibilities, including a rather demanding job. Well, I guess it’s not really unfortunate, since it does pay for my writing addiction. However, this week I have all sorts of tasks on my real life to-do list, including producing and submitting a research grant proposal. I’m desperate to get back to Las Vegas and my naughty wedding party, but so far I haven’t been able to steal any time at all for Lisabet to come out and play.

Okay, so I am writing this blog post. I could be working on the story, right? The trouble is, it’s tough for me to make any progress in less than an hour. I need to reread what I did in the last session. I need to warm up my linguistic muscles. It takes a while for me to get into the groove.

Anyway, I vacillate between excitement over my story ideas and frustration at not being able to do anything about them. I hope I can find some time tomorrow. Otherwise, I may just explode!