I just sent a message to a few friends. What I want, of course, is for them to reply that I’m not really insane. That this kind of thing is normal and happens to the best of us. I won’t believe them.

Thought I’d share it with you too, because, hey, this is my life as a writer at the moment. The other side of the coin when the writing’s not going well, when indeed you’re wondering: What’s the point of my life?

What I wrote:

I think I’m going insane. Yesterday, I accidentally overwrote all my work on a course module, then started it again, then watched myself (in a fog of something) click NO to saving the changes, and lost it again. I had a complete and total meltdown – the kind in which you pace and cry and scream and want to kill something and you even look at the dog for a millesecond before you throw your beloved thesaurus (not the pocket-sized kind) across the room hard enough to break it in half down the spine. I think in psychiatry they call this “devolving.”

And then today, I couldn’t get stuff on the laptop to work right (or maybe myself to work right) while in a coffeehouse for my supposed lunch hour, and I turned into one of those crazies you sometimes see muttering to themselves and swearing under their breaths and making loony-tune faces.

AND THEN: I somehow forgot that I was on a teleconference call, UNmuted, and proceeded to throw a fit at my computer complete with the f-bomb, and I was pretty darned audible. And it was a childish fit – completely mortifying and I can’t stop obsessing about my mortification. My cheeks are still burning up two hours later.

Something’s seriously wrong with me these days.

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So maybe you’re thinking that my subconsious is telling me something. As if I didn’t already know that I’m veering off my best path! Yesterday as I was coming off my meltdown I ruminated as follows: I need money, and I’m only technical-writing for the money. Well then, if I’m going to work for the money, why don’t I attempt to write a romance or a paranormal or a suspense novel? I mean, if I’m working for money wouldn’t writing any type of fiction be better than what I’m currently doing?

Last night, I had to laugh (maybe there’s hope for me yet), however. I’m reading The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, and I happened to read this passage: …and I’ll spend my declining years in a grimy bed-sit, with my teeth falling out one by one. Oh, I can see it all now: No one will buy my books, and I’ll ply Sidney (read: editor/agent) with tattered, illegible manuscripts, which he’ll pretend to publish out of pity. Doddering and muttering, I’ll wander the streets carrying my pathetic turnips in a string bag (picture my beloved thesaurus), with newspaper tucked into my shoes…Oh God. This way lies insanity.

That’s exactly how I felt, how I have been feeling.

P.S. Later: Just discovered the teleconference session was recorded, and my fit of pique — to put it quaintly — is out there for all the muckety-mucks to hear — again.