Because I hate, and loathe, and despise, every. single. bloody.thing. I’ve. ever. written.
I’m deeply in the throes of ennui, Gentle Reader, and with ennui comes hate, oozing black hate that seeps over everything and taints it all with its muck. A hate so intense, so fierce, that, while reading the start of one of my novels, I actually rolled my eyes–rolled my eyes!–at something I had written.
That kind of hate. The darkest, blackest, fiercest hate that can only come for one’s own writing when one is In A Funk.
Not to say that I’m not writing. I am. I wrote four pages yesterday on the Austen/Gaskell Project. I have been blogging. I have been doing every kind of writing except the writing that I want to be doing, which is working on A Project. I miss it, Gentle Reader. I miss writing every morning. But when I sat down this morning to compose, I hated everything I looked at.
Start something new? Yes, I believe I must. I have to break through this wall as quickly as possible because writing is a muscle: the longer you go without exercising it, the harder it gets to do so, like playing a musical instrument. When This Humble Author played music in her youth–Lo, these many years past!–she was told that for every day you miss practicing, it takes two days to make up for it: one to get you to where you were, and one to move you past.
If that’s the case with writing, I fear I will never catch up again.
The Postmodern Bluestocking 
Just keep at it! Have you asked anyone else to read your writing? I’ve just had my husband read some of my work. I knew that it was missing something but I couldn’t figure out what. He read it and came up with some really good critiques. (I actually had to stop him at one point because he had too many!) I need to revamp the entire thing, but he gave me so many things to think about and I feel like I have a direction.
Just because you don’t like what you’ve written, doesn’t mean that it’s bad. Maybe it just needs to be reworked. They say that the best writing is rewriting. I think that there are times that we need to know when a project is a bust and when to move on to something new, but I think that it’s worth trying to refine it a few times first.
Thanks! This is more of an all-consuming hate, in which I look at everything–academic and otherwise–and it disgusts me. Many of these aren’t even long enough to get commentary yet, but my husband is my writing partner, too! I’m so grateful to have such a great and honest (sometimes too honest!) reader 🙂
Cheers,
Amy