Q:Does the persistent anxiety that you should be writing more ever go away?
The glib answer would be to say, “Ask me in a few more years.”
But, more truthfully, while I understand exactly what you’re talking about, I don’t experience that feeling as anxiety so much as I feel a sense of incompleteness in any day where I don’t accomplish something. Some days, that sense of accomplishment can only be attained by writing; other days I can feel quite accomplished just playing with my daughter.
These days, as POWERS rushes toward its first day of production and I have a great number of duties other than writing, I rarely lack for a sense of accomplishment, but I do feel very much that I need to be writing. In this case it is because of actual looming deadlines. These are not my usual self-imposed deadlines, or even the often malleable deadlines of a publisher; these are hard and practical deadlines that must be met in order to allow the dozens (soon hundreds) of people involved with the production to do their own work. Scripts first, everything else after. So, yes, lately I feel some anxiety that I should be writing more. But I feel more anxiety that I should be playing with my daughter more.
Surreal illustrations by Jose Emroca Flores.
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