Thursday, January 8, 2015

Burn Pile List #3... Emotional Hoovering

(click for image source)
Tool #3 to add to my collection of crap not useful to a writer is the curse of unintentional emotional hoovering.

No, don’t toss your Dyson out into the yard just yet.

And, please, don’t picture me with an actual vacuum cleaner attached to my head.

This emotional hoovering, like most things I talk about, is only a metaphor/allusion/a-pretend-to-understand-my-madness bit… Yes, another one of those. So sorry.

Please, let me explain before you storm toward the exits.

When big “breaking news” occurs, I have a tendency to suck up every single emotion every single person in the horrible event is feeling.

Just call me the Suckerfish of Empathy. And yes It’s as ugly as it sounds.

Even worse for my selfish little existence, however, is the way in which my hoovering of grief, fear, panic and helplessness drains the life right out of my writing (i.e. it’s hard to concentrate on fictional melodrama when real life sh*t is going on right in front of you.)

For instance, yesterday, it took nearly seven hours of on again, off again work to get 200 words written on the Six Brothers project. That’s just crap, ok?

So, to the Burn Pile List all unintentional emotional hoovering goes.

May it burn bright.

Until tomorrow…

Chloe

Post Note: Yesterday I learned that my 17th novel Quiver will be released on Thursday, January 15! A bit of good news on an otherwise bleak day.

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