Weeks 20 & 21 - Notes from a Sick Bed

Just when it was all going so well, the Kit Kats stopped appealing.

On track to complete my first draft... hitting a chapter a week... Life was good.

Then the wheels fell off in spectacular fashion.

You know you’re properly ill (as opposed to not being able to face another day of pointless meetings when people talk about singing from hymn sheets - whatever that means) when the things that really motivate you are suddenly as appealing as an All You Can Eat buffet in Michael’s Meat Market is to Paul McCartney.

For me, I knew I was ill when a packet of Kit Kats remained untouched for a whole week.

And if the Kit Kats don’t appeal, writing a few thousand words just isn’t going to happen. Not that I didn’t try - I even managed to write a couple of hundred words. But they were terrible.

Even through my drugged up mind, I could tell they were horrible. The tablets I was taking had no Doors of Perception effect on my writing; the only similarity my writing had to those doors was that it was wooden.

So I retreated to the couch, tried to watch some TV (have you ever sat and tried to watch daytime TV? The Spanish Inquisition had nothing on the horrors in the daytime schedule. I found myself missing the test card.)

When I finally began to feel human again, a whole week had gone by. I was seriously behind, with time to my deadline getting closer at an alarming rate.

As I write this, I have yet to catch up; although I have started to make some progress.

I will get back on track. I will make the time up. How do I know this? Because I want to get back on track and I want to make the time up. That, of course, is the key.

My week off made me realise that it did not matter if you got behind, as long as you were passionate about what you were doing. Without wanting to sound all evangelistic: if you don’t love to write...if you don’t need to write, then a set back will be just that. If you do love/need to write, it will be no more than an interruption.

I don’t think I have ever read a book on writing that does not make this point: you have to want to write. What they tend not to say is that there’s nothing like a week of coughing up bizarrely green stuff to make you see if this applies to you.

The good news is that it does. I am now hard at work to make the time up. It’s not easy, but I will get there now I’m on the mend.

How can I be so sure I’m on the road to recovery? That’s easy. All the Kit Kats have gone.