Not only does my writing affect my mood, but my mood affects my writing. If I’m having a bad day in general, my writing goes poorly. If I’m in a good mood when I start to write, it’s usually goes well.

When conversing with non-writing friends, though, they can’t seem to tell that me being in a bad mood means it is NOT THE TIME to be asking how the writing is going.

(And hah! Caps are good sometimes.)

Then again, when I get out of my bad writing day, and I suddenly have an idea my mood’s not much better, just completely different. I can randomly shout out, “Hey, that would work!” pretty much anywhere and then start planning out chapters out loud, having full conversations with myself. This could be anywhere from inside the safety of my home office or in the middle of a restaurant, store, library, etc. where people generally look at me like I’m crazy, but aren’t we all? Then after I have this fabulous idea written down, I have an incredibly scary happy mood for a few days before I convince myself that everything I’ve ever written is horrible again.

As to other careers, I thought immediately – in a femtosecond! just had to throw in that word – of a quote I read in a ballet dancer’s journal. Something like, “You know, you wake up and the sun is shining. Then you have a bad class and your day is ruined.”

Yeah… Total agreement. Except I don’t have to deal with deadlines, so I make like Serafina and go do something else. Like read your blog, which of course, is the reason for my existance. ; )
But yeah, normally when I can’t write properly I write pages of random nonsense until my writing ability reappears. I have pages of stuff describing my toothbrush and explaining why I prefer metric to US customary measurements. <_<

i believe this is my first post, been lurking for a bit, so: hello! and great stuff.

Seeing as the Patriots met the same fate in the Super Bowl, you obviously can feel my pain. Perhaps we should hug it out.

I always argue that it is, but only on shitty writing days, when my brain is malfunctioning & my characters aren’t really saying anything.

Note for everyone else: The dialogue above is verbatim MJ.

but the biggest mood changer is when i’m starting a new story—i go into the whole coma deal and laugh at odd intervals and am unaffected by real life horrors because i have reached that level of joy.

The worst, I find, is circling in, getting ever closer to beginning the book, having it all on the tip of your tongue (tip of your fingers?) and yet not quite knowing how to start the blasted thing. How to open the floodgates. I just went through two weeks of false starts, agonizing hours where I sat before the comp researching extraneous stuff on the net, trying to pick out the right songs to listen to, wondering at which point to pick up the narrative thread, from who’s point of view, etc.

Which made for an exceedingly frustrating time. I don’t think I became grumpy, but rather I was simply worn out, as if I’d just sat through a five hour exam and was pretty sure I hadn’t done very well. But it finally clicked on Monday night, and yesterday I continued to race along, so since then I’ve been feeling decidedly more upbeat!

on all accounts, even to writers being a neurotic, whingey bunch.

And somehow, it’s always easier for me to write when I’ve got a deadline, I suppose because deadlines discourage procrastination, at which I excel. Hmm, they also encourage writing at two in the morning, which is when I start saying the penguins live in Alaska …