SUBTLE ADDICTIONS are SO PERVASIVE...
and we all have a few dozen going!
I used to say I had writer's block. Now I rephrase it. I confess that I have a dozen, weird addictions that I do daily that are either time consuming, aging or health-damaging that I can never get a stitch of work done on a NOVEL.
I can list these bad habits that one way or another, keep me from being a focused novelist. I eat a breakfast that would make a snail run lke a Cheetah: homemade jam on bible bread toast, strong black coffee. This breakfast gives so much spilkas one can't slow down for creative writing. The languid intuition disappears. One is verbal without soul. Like a runaway out of control car on the freeway.
The very fact I cling to a starch breakfast is morally dubious when I will eat home made butter cookies at 4pm, hot oatmeal at midnight with cream and raisins. That's a lot of CARBS! Of course these addictions are interspersed with wholesome protein & vegie meals, as I'm not suicidal.
Other addictions are gross timewasters, veritable time eaters. 
I
will list them just in case you recognize some of your own weaknesses and
figure out a cure and can send remedy to me: staying on the computer
all day, TV news blaring in my left ear interspersed with Oprah. E-mail
back and forth with friends, giving free tarot or horoscope readings to
whining neighbor ladies in a barrio where nobody has a nickle, (Not like
my posh L.A in the old high rent days!) gardening, baby plant-nursery care,
running to nearest market daily for catfood, doing a little dumpster diving,
writing mini-articles for my websites on ecclectic subjects from
babies to romance to authors, to how to write a screenplay, then relaxing
from all that effort watching primetime TV shows like the new, unique "Journeyman",
a fine show, not an addiction at all, but Cold Case, CSI, NCIS, HOUSE,
BONES....they ARE! Then to top off the crime show glut, reading mysteries
or thrillers until dawn. Weekends have their OWN addictions: hitting the
garage sales, driving around all day looking for cheap, used books,
bookshelves, artware pottery, vintage kitchen accoutrements. The mania
of COLLECTING. Quelle vice!
These are all meaningless, boredom-staving timepassers but they are also very fulfilling tasty and amusing. Truth be told, they are addictions and they slow me down from my appointed rounds! I should wake, have my coffee and go to work on my own novels, picking up where I paused at page 260, and finishing each of them, and then I should send them to NYC agents! GET A LIFE!
I am full of writing talent but I choose this banal, addiction-ridden
life! Go FIGURE! I now understand those middle class kids who write novels
complaining that their parents are boring. How they're addicted to classes
or groups, country club, bingo or mah jong or are home imbibing Scotch
with their pals in the den and playing cards.
Kids can spot how we adults turn to frivolous pursuits to support us
emotionally or stave off boredom. They just don't realize that they too
are well on the road to this with pals/ cell phones, mall visits. For a
few it's sexual affairs but for most of us, it's shopping, reading, tv,
coffee and sweets to pep us up, to 'gird our loins' for the daily war.
For many it's a beer to relax us after the fray.
We use our addictions and body tuners, to thwart stress and then to fill downtime which may be too tame. Life is full of routine, boredom so our addictions are calculated to be RELIEF. In reality, all our addictions throw the body OUT OF TUNE and waste TIME and end up slowing us down in a huge way.
Years ago my son noted that I went at my morning coffee the way an addict went at his needle, falling on it with gusto, need, religosity almost. He noted that I made coffee like black lava using no tools known to man. I made hobo coffee! I got control over those beans! I extracted their power. I was after the maximum effect. My son, who understood cocaine briefly, and a little too well, could see all that ---while I carefully simmered water, brought it to a boil, turned off fire, threw in a double dose of fresh ground Colombian, let it steep five minutes then strained it into the cup as if I were making communion wafers.
Because I know I have a few addictions, I am watchful for signs of new addictions and now see how I am drawn to watching certain tv shows (JOURNEYMAN, "Surface", back when NBC had those 15 wonderous episodes with the kid who adopts an alien reptile whose species has invaded earth's oceans!) I watch BECKER RE-RUNS, that 70's show, as TOPHER GRACE is the next TOM HANKS.....there's so much superb TV out there that I never saw in first run primetime. LAW AND ORDER. UNBELIEVEABLE! FAB FAB ENTERTAINMENT. VINCE D'onfrio is so good. and my fave of all, DA VINCI INQUEST!
I see myself in my mental mirror, 10,000 books stacked around me, the walls of every room high with bookshelves, rooms so thickly padded radio waves can't get in or out and I'm lying there devouring mysteries and thrillers like a giant, literate hippo, munching away at the scenery. Then cuz I'm a groupie, a psychlogical malady that goes with physical ones, I'm readiong BIOS of the great writers, addicted to those, too!
I am carefully noting the multi-featured features of addiction in shame and horror yet I confess them all no cure has come. I slavishly read about the great writers with the same vengeance that I read everything they ever wrote. Not Melville, Austen, Alcott, Twain or Dickens! Who's talking about THEM? I'm talking about Daniel Silva, LEE CHILD, ROBERT PARKER, LAWRENCE BLOCK, FREDERIC FORSYTH, SUE GRAFTON, Robert Crais, Michael Connelly. I read every single scrap they ever wrote then like a hippo who has mowed the lake and the lawn and the meadow with her immense jaws, I move on, grazing, seeking new fields to plow, Daniel Silva, Daniel Woodrell. John Burdette and the Thai mysteries. I GOTTA GET SOMETHING ELSE TO DO! ALL THIS INHALING and no exhaling. But in the morning when I am about to start writing...there's email to do, people to answer, then my coffee and buttered toast wears off, ---I have high level munchies but eating and digesting protein stops me cold, produces sleep, really takes it out of me. Gotta kick back, watch OPRAH, ELLEN, RACHAEL RAY and endless news while I type horoscopes and articles on HOW TO WRITE MYSTERIES and THRILLERS. Sticking all of it in the NOVELISTS SEMINAR, the FILM WRITER's INDEX or the the HOW TO WRITE ARCHIVE.
So I end up teaching writing online but not being a writer. Just being addicted. And I live in constant fear of escalation into CABLE, DVD's or VIDEOS so I live without those three extra entertaining things as I hear that when you start you can't stop, like when you start with grass, it escalates to coke then downers then heroin meaning if I got CABLE it would lead to DVD's then who knows? I''m afraid of opening a Krantz or KOONTZ, a John Sandford, a....I hesitate to even think it, a Sidney Sheldon or a Danielle Steele novel.
You got remedies for the ADDICTION THAT ATE THE ADDICT? For getting out of ruts? Does one just stop cold? Do I quit collecting vintage stuff , quit ordering used books at ABES, quit eating starches and just lock myself in a room cold turkey with no TV news, just a PC that has no email capabilities and pour the energy into a few books? Screenplays? And then go eat a filet of sole? Is that the ticket? Anita Sands astrology@earthlink.net
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