Imagine Dragons

I am the Khaleesi of excuses. I rely on them. I clutch them close to my bosom like the baby dragons they are.

Because they are, in fact, dragons. And if there’s one thing we know about dragons, regardless of whether they’re from George R.R. Martin or J.R.R. Tolkien, it’s that they’re flying fiends of fiery…uh…fiery crap, really. Excuses are like a deluge of nonsense, and like dragons, they aren’t even real.

I’ve had a bunch of excuses for not writing lately. They’re probably the same most writers have. I was trying to call them “explanations,” in a further attempt to justify what I knew was really just sort of a scared-to-write-anything-because-I-want-it-to-be-good-but-I’ll-probably-mess-it-up laziness. Part lazy, bigger part scared.

Natalie Goldberg says, in her book Writing Down the Bones

This is the practice school of writing. … You practice whether you want to or not. You don’t wait for inspiration and a deep desire to run. It’ll never happen, especially if you are out of shape and have been avoiding it.

I had been avoiding it, though I was couching that in more psychological jargon than an early Woody Allen movie. I thought, if I waited long enough, that this nonsense would drift apart like a fog dissipating at sunrise. That didn’t happen. (It never does that. I already knew that. Two scoops of derp with sprinkles of stupid and a generous dollop of denial flavored whipped topping!) Instead, it just got worse. The dragons, like they tend to do, just got bigger. And hungrier. As these dragons matured into ever more gargantuan proportions, they were no longer satisfied with the lambs my mind typically offered (Facebook posts, emails). Nah. They wanted sacrificial virgins dressed in flowing garments.

Like dragons, they were completely fictitious, and yet, on the big screen of my imagination, they were ginormous soul-sucking behemoths that frightened me into submission. Really, it was almost like Smaug was living in my skull. Without the gold. Sigh…

There was only one solution. (And no, it wasn’t to hire a worthy knight. Or even a thieving Hobbit!) Kill them. Which really just meant write something. Anything. It didn’t even have to be good. And, like the bullies they are, they were gone. They didn’t even fly away as much as vaporize.

The pen is mightier than the sword after all!