Self Motivation

The days slide by, filled with inactivity. And yet, several encouragements and some successes have come to us during that time. Our new grandchildren are merrily doing their job: grow. Our six year old grandson is tackling full time school in First Grade and seems to be holding his own in his expanding universe. Diane has been crocheting beautiful goods for sale and a few have already sold. With the season over, her off season hours as a baker have been cut back as expected; she is filling her time with her other talents. Inactivity is not her problem, but mine. For me have come some very very small royalties for my books on Kindle and CreateSpace, and The Fear of Monkeys is the most recent e-zine to publish one of my poems. There also has been a less intense outpouring of new poems, plus an idea which I am reluctant to address for a long project I am reluctant to begin. My reluctance is two-fold. One (and always): can I do the idea justice? And two: will it absorb me and dominate me for the next full year, or two, to the exclusion of all else? Tangentially, am I ready for that kind of commitment and do I have the energy to tackle it? So I hesitate, watching other people’s long projects on TV – The Blacklist, The Roosevelts – and reading long histories by or about Dutchmen. Holland always comes into play, even in my new idea – Gerrit van der Meer, one of the producers of The Blacklist, is Dutch-born like me; the Roosevelts were descended from Nieuw Amsterdam settlers; one book, An Embarrassment of Riches, concerns the Dutch Golden Age; the other, Year Zero, about the immediate after-effects of World War Two in 1945, is by another Dutch-born author with the not so Dutch sounding name Ian Buruma; and Hollandaise flavorings will add character to the new project when I launch it. I thus write this blog to help turn my inertia into, at least for a moment, fingers moving on the keyboard. And then there is always an underlying, convenient thought, that I ought to do some proper research for my Dutch material on location. On that, I can dream. I once read that the hardest thing for a writer to do is to actually write. More specifically, I think it is to start. We will do anything, find any excuse, to put it off. Gotta visit a friend; gotta pick the grandson up from school at 3, so better not start now; let’s go shopping; the world is too depressing for me to focus on my own stuff; oh boy, Doctor Who is on tonight! It’s not writer’s block, it’s reluctance with a heavy dosing of avoidance. So excuse me, please, the last episode of The Rooselvelts is on the DVR.