One Dot a Day

...keeps the insanity away.  But what if you can't get through that dot?

What if it's not really a dot, but a huge swamp of despair that seeps off the page and into your writing space and swallows up your floor, your furniture and everything around you?  What if that swamp turns into an enormous black hole, a vortex of nothingness that eats up life as you know it until all that's left is you and a blank screen.

That's when it's time to smack some sense into myself.

Seriously, it's just one stupid dot, one tiny splotch of ink on the page that is my outline.  It's just a dot.  I can write a dot.  That's, like, the size of punctuation.  It's no biggie.  Maybe I can't write a whole book today, but I can write a dot.  I'll even throw in some words for good measure.  And it doesn't even have to be a good dot at that.  Just a dot.

Julia Cameron wrote in her book Supplies that when you run into a wall in your creativity, don't try going up over it.  Instead, do what those characters in prison-break movies do: they make a hole under the wall and wriggle their way under.

So that's what I'm going to do.  Just one tiny dot, and it can be a lousy dot while I'm at it.  And maybe, just maybe, when I've written a handful of lousy dots, I'll have the beginnings of a real project.