By the power of ink, I banish thee

"We interrupt your regularly scheduled writing session for a bit of personal drama."

This message has been running through my mind for the past two weeks. Usually when there’s drama that interrupts and/or postpones my WIP it’s something that has happened to someone else and because I care about that person, I feel obliged to help. I don’t mind helping out and I never resent them for it. It’s not their fault that a monkey was thrown into their plans. However, when the drama is mine and it’s caused by a personal demon, I take exception.

I’m not going to go into specifics since the persons involved have no idea that their words and actions raised an old demon – and I don’t want them to know. The issue is mine and since our paths rarely cross it’s unlikely that something like this will happen again. Besides, I thought I’d banished this particular demon a long time ago.

Fortunately, re-banishing this demon is a simple matter. It involves some cathartic writing. The first time I tried this method I had mixed feelings about it. The cathartic story succeeded in helping me work through the anger and angst that attracted the demon in the first place, but the story itself ended up in the trash because it was too emo to see the light of day.

That was several years ago. I’m a better writer than I was then and I’m hoping that when I’ve worked through this that the end result will be something respectable. I don’t care if it’s publishable. While that would be nice, that’s not what I’m aiming for in this regard. What I’m aiming for is a return to normalcy so I can resume work on the Cyberfunk. The strong emotions this drama has affected make it hard for me to concentrate on anything else. Even though I really should be working on the Cyberfunk today (I have two weeks to finish it) I need to take a short break from it so I can clear my head. If I don’t the negative emotions running around my skull will sour the story and that’s the last thing I want. By channeling it into a random short story that I don’t particularly care about, I can exorcise my psyche and move on.

As I said earlier, I am a better writer now, so I have a small hope that the cathartic story will be something worthy of submission. If it’s not, it will have served it’s purpose so it’s still a win in the end.