Stress And You...and Me...but Mostly Maureen

At the latest Drunk Writer Talk (Steph, Eileen, you were missed. We toasted you often) Maureen was talking about her stress level due to the deadlines for her books but as of the third pint she was going to try and stop living her life in a writer's panic.

And I said: "wait a second! I'm living in a writer's panic"

And then Sinead said: "more cider!"

Or something like that. But we did talk about stress and frankly, how utterly unavoidable it is.

I'm not even going to discuss the stress of waiting, of being on submission and spending every moment of your life denying the deadly siren call of booze, chocolate and your email inbox. And I'm not going to talk about the stress of rejection which can, in turn, make you fighting angry, or reduce you to a quivering mass of insecurity. I'm not going to talk about bad covers, bad reviews, low sell-through numbers or option books. Because, frankly, those are the given stresses. The kinds that come with the business of writing and we all know - business is stressful.

It's the secret stress that's killing me. The writing stress. Coming up with crap that is interesting and in some way unexpected, but also totally satisfying - stressful. Then remembering that crap when you're in the process of switching it all around. Sure, you can have notes and programs, but things are going to slip through the holes in our Swiss cheese brains. Knowing something is wrong, but not being sure how to fix it. And then realizes what will fix it requires pretty much a total rewrite - which means coming up with new crap.

And it would be one thing if we could all go to our office, work for a few hours, go to lunch, come back work a few more hours and then leave all that work behind and get back to a life. But we can't because we're writers. So, we're writing in the car on our way to holiday parties like Eileen. We're waking up at some stupid hour so we can get ten pages in like Stephanie. F***ing Sinead, has a new baby, is moving next week and she's heading to her computer every night to work on a new project. What the what???

Maureen and I are both on deadline - Maureen's is insane. She's got to write 23 hours out of 24 and the few hours she spends getting plastered with her writing buddies - are hours she should be thinking about fairy tales. Every minute I'm not at my computer right now is a minute that stresses me out, because I'm sure with just three hours in a row I could get past the hump in my rewrite. But all this life is getting in my way.

The agony of a writer's life is that when things are going well - we live in a panic. Of course, when things aren't going well - we also live in a panic.

Writer's stress - totally unavoidable.