The Greatness of Inertia

Now that I'm back in the swing of things, or in the habit again maybe, I can't seem to stop writing.  For years I hadn't written anything, and only talked about the book I was 'working' on.  Now I'm back to actually working on it.  Go figure.  A few months ago, encouraged by the popularity of my articles on wrytestuff.com, I actually submitted a query to an agent.  The query was rejected, which for some reason doesn't bother me in the least.  I'm not sure why.  Maybe it's because I know people actually read my work and like it, so one agent doesn't mean a whole heck of a lot in the grand scheme of things.

So far I've had more than 14,000 page views of my articles, and hundreds for this blog, so with the rising level of confidence - as well as an amazing level of boredom perhaps - I've gotten back into working on my book.  Even with the final draft open on my laptop, I'm zipping over to this blog to write this, and logging in to wrytestuff.com to answer comments and that sort of thing.  It's like a constant writing jag, and it feels amazing.

It's been so long since I felt that "I have to write" vibe.  I enjoy writing in general, even without that, which got me doing the articles at least, and that put me back on the 'path of righteousness' I guess.  Inertia is a wonderful thing.  When most people think of the word, I think they have the impression it means to be still, when it actually has to do with the laws of physics.  Inertia is defined as this:  A body at rest tends to stay at rest, and a body in motion tends to stay in motion.  It's not about standing still particularly, it's about continuing on with what you were doing.  With inertia, an outside force is required to interrupt whatever it is you were doing, whether it's standing still or moving in any direction.  If you run into a wall, that's an outside force.  If you're standing there and a car knocks you twenty feet down the street, that's also an outside force.  Granted, just wind resistance is an outside force that will slow you down until you stop.

I think wind resistance is what I've been dealing with.  It's such a subtle thing.  I mean this metaphorically, of course.  Life itself is like the wind.  It's all those little, day to day things that we allow interference in our lives.  If a large outside force had been trying to keep me from writing, I would have fought against it.  It would have been obvious, and I would have resented it.  Instead, I simply didn't notice that anything was in my way.  There's the whole procrastination thing, too.  You don't feel like you're not going to get something done.  You just think you'll be doing it later.  Then you start asking yourself when 'later' is going to be happening, once you've gone a few years without doing what you planned to do.

This all makes me think of the arguments I used to have with my ex about what I was doing with my life.  Now those were like walls, in that I noticed them and resisted their interference.  I've been a very strong person for a long time, not letting anyone tell me what I can or can't do.  The reason I think of my ex is that my writing was one thing he said he had confidence in, that I might actually succeed with it one day.  That was a very strange thing to hear from him, actually, because he wasn't the most encouraging spouse in the world.  Also, he'd never really read my work, so I wasn't sure where he was getting his confidence from.

Admittedly, when I had to spend actual time working on my writing, and all the research that goes into it, my ex wasn't quite so supportive.  He hated it when my attention wavered from him, and I think that's where I finally lost my "I have to write" vibe.  It disappeared slowly, so slowly I didn't notice it happening until I realized one day that I was no longer working on my book, or anything to do with my writing.  His surface support and confidence tricked my brain into thinking there was no resistance, when there was actually a lot of it - it was just invisible.

Then there was the exhaustion I was dealing with, that still overtakes me quite a bit.  To this day I don't thinks there's a medical reason for it or anything.  I believe it's psychological.  I was a burnout.  At the age of twenty-five I suddenly developed a fever to get my ass in gear and become at least somewhat successful career-wise.  I worked my ass off, sometimes putting in sixty- and eighty-hour weeks.  I enjoyed working, actually, so the work wasn't really the problem.  It was regular life that messed me up.  On top of work I had my daughter.  While she was growing up, and to this day, she had two learning disabilities.  I had to teach her alternate methods of learning - something I knew how to do because I'd taught them to myself.

I went through a few serious relationships, including marriages, and all the fighting unsuccessful relationships entail.  Drama, drama, drama.  Something I can't even stand to think about now.  I used to crave the ups and downs of romance, and it made me feel alive.  By the time I hit thirty, though, I was starting to lose my taste for it.  Being with my most recent ex for over six years cured me of all desire for emotional highs and lows.  It was that one thing that kept me from ever seriously wanting to get back together with him.  It hadn't been the first time we'd had a serious break-up by any means, but I hadn't reached the end of my rope like this before.

Now we've been separated for almost six years, I think, or maybe it's five.  I can't really remember.  We became friends finally, despite not being friends while we were actually together, and yet I still couldn't bring myself to even allow the opening of a discussion about reconciliation.  I was done.  I was exhausted and cynical, and completely lacking in any need for companionship.  The thought is more than enough to drain me of any energy I might have in me at the time.

At thirty-five my corporate career was over as far as I was concerned.  I was laid off, and someone else was brought in to do my job.  Before I was aware she was there to replace me, I trained her as "backup".  I was in charge of payroll for a Canadian and US employer, so it was salt in the wound when she screwed up the only two things she could have screwed up, with my payroll documentation.  She messed up my ROE (Record of Employment - it's for Canada's Employment Insurance), and then she messed up my T4 (the annual government form for doing our income taxes in Canada).

Not only did this woman have better educational qualifications than I had (so she really had no excuse), but they were also paying her about 50% higher wages.  It was pretty disgusting.  Before I was canned she tried to 'correct an error' I'd supposedly made, and it turned out she'd made the error when she'd done her calculations, forgetting to put a decimal in the right place, and there wasn't anything wrong with my journal entries.  She was a certified accountant for crying out loud, and she didn't know where to put a decimal!  Can you say bitter?  Oh, yeah.  I was very, very bitter.

Bitterness with the corporate world made me realize there was no such thing as job security when you worked for someone else.  Sure, running a business was risky, but nowhere near as risky as working for other people who could lay you off just because they didn't like you.  There is no loyalty from companies for their employees who rely on them.  They simply don't care.  It didn't matter that I was setting up a payroll system for them that would save them tens of thousands of dollars every years.  I was right on the verge of implementing it when they pulled the rug out from underneath me.  Talk about wasting their money.  They'd been paying me the whole time to work on this project, and then didn't even wait until it was done before they let me go.

To this day some of my worst dreams are about me going back to work for a couple of my old employers.  Not just the last one, but others before that.  Admittedly there's satisfaction in those dreams as well, that they would realize their mistake and want me back, but the horror of being in a room with those people in light of my humiliation is more than enough to nullify any positives there might be in that situation.  I know one place I worked at they were really pissed that I left.  They would likely never have fired me, but then they were paying me really terrible wages.  In my next job I was making 50% higher wages, and even that was somewhat low for the work I was doing.  Still, it allowed me to live a little better than I had been.

Once I started working for myself, though, I finally felt a lot more relaxed.  After the last place laid me off I swore I wouldn't work for anyone but myself ever again, so that gave me the push I needed to get my business going.  I was doing okay with it, too, making around the same amount I was making when I was laid off, but then my physical well-being tanked.  I couldn't sit in a chair, or even sit up in bed, for more than five minutes without being in agony.  My tailbone was the culprit there, which has since been removed.

Then I began having issues walking, driving, climbing stairs, you name it.  That was both my hips deciding they'd had enough.  That issue still has to be dealt with, and for some reason inertia kicks in there, too.  I'm surprised I managed to follow through enough on the medical stuff that my tailbone issue was resolved.  I'm not good about going to doctors.  Now I spend a good portion of my time in a drug-induced haze.  I don't mean street drugs, either, for those of you who might not have read my previous posts.

I'm either on Percocets and Gravol, or I'm on codeine and Gravol.  Narcotics make me really nauseous, so whatever I'm on I need Gravol (Dramamine in the US).  Anyone who has taken it knows that even one tablet will make you pretty drowsy, if not knock you out completely.  I have to take at least two of them each time I take my painkillers.  You can imagine why I might have difficulty getting anything accomplished.  So, it's with some surprise that I've been able to get serious about my writing again.  It takes me to the outside limit of my current intellectual capacity, of course, seeing as nobody is particularly intelligent when they're on these kinds of drugs, but at least I'm doing something with my life.  I'm just lucky it's the one thing I've wanted to do with my life since I was about twelve years old.

I can't even remember what the book was about that I started writing at the age of twelve.  It has disappeared into some memory neverland, from which it will not be returning.  I would have to assume it wasn't very good, though.  Twelve-year-olds rarely write well.  I think Gordon Korman was an exception, but even then he wrote books for kids his own age.  Writing this, I decided to look him up and found out he's originally Canadian, and holds dual citizenship with the US.  He's still writing and publishing, and Disney had a show that went for four years based on his work.

I do remember the book I was working on as a teenager, although I don't believe it was very good either.  It was mostly about revenge against a boyfriend who dumped the main character, and was loosely based on myself.  I had chosen an excerpt from a different song for the beginning of each chapter, the lyrics having something to do with what happened in that chapter.  Once I got over being dumped myself, I stopped working on the book, so it was probably just a therapeutic exercise.

As an adult I actually finished another book.  A romance, no less, which is totally not my style these days.  I can't even read the things without cringing, despite the fact that I have dozens of romance novels in my bookshelves.  I used to read them a lot, but they were never the Harlequin type.  I read full novels with a lot more depth and intelligence, and they actually increased my knowledge of history dramatically (or would that be literally, seeing as I got the knowledge from literature?).

Historical romance is usually very well researched, although some authors are lazy about that.  For instance, poker wasn't around until the mid-eighteen hundreds if I remember correctly, but I've read some books that have them playing it much earlier.  It was originally a French game called poque and decks of cards back them did not have the 52 cards we use today.  I know this from my own research for the historical romance I wrote.  I never did send that to a publisher or agent, though.  I was polishing the final draft when I suddenly stopped working on it.  Every once in a while I think about going back to it, finishing it off and sending it to someone, since that book was actually pretty good.  It's just that I do not want to be slotted as a romance writer.  It's not what I want to be writing.  Maybe I could publish it under a pseudonym, or I could wait until my current project is published, which is a crime/murder mystery novel series.  I'd rather be categorized as that type of writer, and not written off by the general public.

Well, crap.  There's that wind resistance.  My stupid pills are turning me into an idiot again, so I'll have to start back to work on my book at another time.  Writing while under the influence of Gravol and pain meds does not work for me.  I need my brain for this book.  Serial killers and their plot lines require more concentration than I'm capable of displaying at the moment.  I don't know how writers who drink manage to write anything worth reading.  Granted, I was never a fan of Hemingway.

Of course, thinking of Hemingway I had to research him a little while writing this.  Yes, he drank a lot, yes, he committed suicide, but he also had a physical reason for the way he was that I was unaware of - Hemochromatosis, which is an inability to metabolize iron that causes physical and mental deterioration.  So, maybe he wasn't an idiot, which is pretty much what I think of people who commit suicide.  I suppose if I had to live the way I am now, for the rest of my life, and knew that my brain was going to shut down on me, I'd probably contemplate suicide, too.