What got in the way of writing in the last month?

1. I returned to my full-time job that eats up from 5:30 a.m. until about 3 p.m. most days.
2. I returned to my part-time job that eats up from 3 p.m. to about 5:30 p.m. most days.
3. I got sick, but the kind of sick that makes your head feel like it’s been stuffed with wool, and it went on for three weeks.

After a long, healthy, productive summer of writing, it was quite a letdown. I didn’t think I’d get in eight hours of writing every day after I returned to my life as a physics teacher, but I did think I might do an hour some nights or at least a bit on weekends. I’ve written like that for years, but I couldn’t engage my brain to do anything harder than watching a show or trying to read a book.

If exhaustion and busyness are kinds of writer’s block, you can keep them.

When I write, I seldom have a problem finding a place to start, and when I find a place to start, I have never actually run into writer’s block in the traditional sense. I usually think of a title or a collection of words that strikes me as unusual or interesting and then I write. I have hundreds of these titles in a file that I’ve maintained for a damn long time, and if I can’t think of something to write, I open the file, pick some words, and start writing.

To give you some idea of what I mean, here are some stories I’m working on that started simply as titles: This Lonely Spiral, The Brandy Dance, We Grow Immortal, A Collection of Shadows, etc. Sometimes this produces surprises, such as when The Owl Hunter became The Familiar, and when Broken Beautiful became The Healer of Stonebarrow.

If there’s a lesson in here, I hope it’s an understanding that no matter what roadblocks appear, when the road starts to clear up I have to get back to making time to write.