My Kryptonite

My life is filled with worry, stress, and tinged with grief of late. People I love are sick, friends are sick, deadlines loom, I'm overtired because of insomnia (been up since 1:00 a.m. and it's now 6:20 p.m. Do the math). It's life. I have been in a roughly ten-day cycle of extreme pressure and anxiety. And thus . . . it is my Kryptonite.

I can write through exhaustion.

I can write through illness. Hell, been doing that for years.

I can write through anger.

I can write through a move several states away with my life in boxes.

I can write in a hotel room all alone.

I can write with six or seven kids running through my house.

I can even write while nursing a baby.

But I cannot write through anxiety. It is my Kryptonite. It is what shuts me down.

It is what it is. I am on a nine-day prayer vigil undertaken for people with cancer in my life and for my baby and other things that are troubling me. The prayer vigil is helping to conquer anxiety because I feel like I am DOING something. But I am still not at 100%.

So . . . blog friends . . . whether you are writers, or readers . . . doesn't matter. What is your Kryptonite?

A Busy Mind

I woke up at 3:00 a.m. today and couldn't fall back to sleep. I don't feel well, so part of it was . . . well, I didn't feel well. The other part of it was I had a lot on my mind. So I did what I usually do when I have a lot on my mind and I can't sleep. I prayed.

And while I am sure zillions (that's a real number, right?) of people the world over have a lot on their minds, I am equally sure that sometimes, writers have the corner market on busy minds.

Why? Well, because it's not just MY mind with problems. It's the 10 characters or so I am thinking about at any given time, and all THEIR problems, and plot difficulties and resolutions and subtle character shifts I have to think about.

It's waking up at two a.m. with a great book idea I have to scribble down. Or the perfect last sentence. Or the perfect first sentence.

And prayer did help to quiet my mind a bit. But I can tell it's going to be a long, TIRED day.

So how about you? A busy mind keep you up? What do you do when it happens? And is it the writing life that intrudes most often?