Monday After Writing Well

Writing well is the highest high in the world. It's not iced tea and a good book on a long afternoon. And it's not a never-seen episode of MI5 on a chilly night with my husband. They're easy. Writing well isn't. Working the words is exhilerating when the words are working; excruciating when they aren't. It's not like torture and it's not like grief. It's like a down-pulling, heavy gravity drawing down feeling, an ennui, a damned 'ole dammed up clump of mediocrity. It makes me tired. It makes me stand up and walk away. It makes me juiceless. Oh...and I hate sitting back down again with the old seat-of-the-pants determination, the old gung-ho grit, the old truth that if I don't feed the word gal, she won't feed me. The muse. I love her with my whole life. That old word gal.