Oh yes.  Feeling crabby.

My last twelve books in twelve months post found me making headway on my fourth book in my series The Zodiac Procession.  Funny that.  Because the closing up feeling is upon me again.  And while a more appropriate metaphor for my writer’s block, or rather, writer’s exhaustion, would be a defensive turtle tucking his appendages and head into his shell, or a snail recoiling away from danger, pulling in his little, soft antennae and sucking up into his shell, I’m sticking with the crab and his shell.  The one he’s in all the time.  That crab, always armored.  He’s proving tough to break.  Never seems to extend anything out that’s completely vulnerable.

I’m closing in on the halfway mark on The Crab and I still have yet to feel like I’m running pace with the story.  In a way, a bad way maybe, I think the story left without me.  I know what’s happening, what will happen, but damned if I can get it written.  I’m hitting that point where my mind tells me, “Hey, you know what’s going to happen in the story.  If anyone ever wants to know, they can just ask you.  And you can relate the happenings over a glass of cider and some antipasto.”  And yea, guess I could do that.  But then I wouldn’t be a writer anymore.  I’d just be a talker.  And anyone can be a talker.  Well, except people that can’t talk.  Oh man.  Some people can’t talk!  Some people have been rendered speechless by throat cancer or childhood illness or terror.  Shocking terror.

Uh-oh, here comes the hate spiral.

Nope, saying no the hate spiral.  Gonna push ahead.  Going to get this rough draft of The Crab in the boiling pot, cook him up, eat him with some drawn butter bedecked with herbs.

I watched the newest Ricky Gervais series on Netflix called Derek very recently.  A character in the show amuses himself by writing swear words on the shells of crabs while spending the day at the ocean.  He writes such colorful terms as “quim”, “twat” and “tits”.  But the best he does is when he writes “boll” and “ocks” on two separate crabs.  They have to be put next to one another for the message to mean anything.

That’s what I’m going to do with The Crab.  I’m going to write “boll” on my forehead, “ocks” on my manuscript, hitch my own proverbial balls high, and get this thing in the can.