I have blocked writing ducts… Those of you who write will understand how this feels.
Take now, for example; I have an unplanned day off my day job due to a sick child. Sick child is now sleeping upstairs, so this is the perfect opportunity to bash out a few words. But what am I doing? I have just taken five minutes to complete an online survey from a courier company who delivered a parcel 20 minutes ago. Would I do such a survey on a regular day? Probably not.
Loyal readers (all one of them) will recall my good old days when I could reel off, prolifically at times, juicy tales of sexual encounters, passion, excitement, adventure and arousal. However, of late, the river has run dry. This is not necessarily because I lack these thoughts or ideas, just that my ability to effectively write about them seems to have been lost. It is not helped by a certain someone asking me not to write about such things any more “because it is an invasion of my privacy”, even though much of my work is embellishment, fantasy or fiction, with only a small sprinkling of truth (in most cases), not to mention the fact that I have always written under the nom de plume Drunken Slut Mum (of which this certain someone is completely unaware, but I have told him this work is anonymous). Perhaps he needs to consult a dictionary on the meaning of anonymous.
Perhaps the difference in my circumstances is all the more pointed because ‘The Man’ (remember him?) was not only flattered by my accounts, but also an accomplice/technical support in getting my blog online and, at least at the very beginning, a keen supporter of my work. Perhaps also, this is the difference between being involved with a creative person and being involved with a non-creative person who sees most things in black and white.
It does not, however, resolve the problem. I neither want to ditch my writing, nor the certain person (just yet, anyway). I did stop showing him my work a long time ago, partly because he was not that interested in it. And what I did show him was a few carefully selected pieces which would not incriminate me!
So, dear readers, I am at something of a crossroads. Drunken Slut Mum is not disappearing completely – I still have something I need to do with her, but as a writer with a real identity I need to consider my future direction. Writing is too important to me to stop and I hope that it can be enjoyed by at least a handful of people, maybe more one day.