Great Description of the Writing Life

Dagoberto Gilb says:

"Writing is a permanent flu — it hits you, you have no control of it. Its symptoms are: Light-headed, feverish daydreaming about writing while at a paying job that you get fired from; gut-wrenching dread of having a worthless, unemployable life while writing one paragraph in two hours for a piece that you may (or may not if it's lousy, which it often is), after you have lots and lots and lots of paragraphs, a hundred or two dollars; finally, and even worse, a hallucinogenic-like bloodrush when something you have written is accepted — this delusional exhilaration can affect personality for many troubled years, even when the only other person to have read it and believed in you and this work, momentarily, was your one and only love (not even your mom will have been impressed), the one you shouldn't have let get away, but she now dismisses you because you're such a financial loser."

The rest of the interview is here.

Here is my situation. We are extremely busy at work. Summer is one of our crunch times. At night, I'm trying to work on a time-consuming and challenging freelance assignment that's due sometime in the next two weeks. (The deadline is "mid-July," and a non-definite deadline is awful for a procrastinator like me.) And the novel is in an interesting phase. Revised enough to be readable by outsiders and a few of my friends have read it. I've been told it reads like "a real book." I've had a few good tweaking suggestions, as well as some typos that eagle-eyed friends have caught. All in all, I'd say I have about two-three days of work to get it to the next stage, which is sending it out. And that's where my problem lies.

Until after "mid-July," I do not have the two or three days I would need to finish. Mentally, I know this is fine. What's a couple of weeks after years of writing? But not working on the book is bugging the righteous holy hell out of me. I am in a weird "what am I doing with my life" mood which always happens if I haven't been writing enough or working on my own projects. I get crabby, cranky, restless. I'm listening to Leonard Cohen, if that gives you insight into the funk I'm describing. And I love me some Leonard Cohen, but I keep reminding myself: jus be patient. Because as soon as I'm done with the freelance gig, I can turn the gas on with my own stuff. Unless, of course, I procrastinate, which I have been known to do.

The most hilarious aspect of this situation is that the agent who has expressed interest in my book is getting married in late July. Then she's going on her honeymoon. So realistically, it would be foolish to send it to her before mid-to-late August anyway. Yet, I continue to torture myself. I think writing is the like the flu. Or perhaps like mooning after your long-lost love, the one you must continue to follow and stalk, long after you have humiliated yourself, long after there's no hope, and long after anyone with any kind of sense would have said "just give it a rest already."