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I wonder… is writing causing me hypertension… anxiety… serious stress… an agitated soul?

I had a major wobble about my writing last week, which nearly had me pushing delete. Probably not a good idea in the last ten days of editing… Fortunately my beloved was on hand to offer fresh perspectives.

I’ve had a tempestuous relationship with this particular book for years. It has survived several bulk deletions. All paper copies I once had ended up in a public waste bin outside a supermarket, from which I’d never be able to retrieve it if I changed my mind. Inevitably I did have second thoughts some months later, at which point I had to procure some advanced file recovery software to recover what I could from the bowels of a hard disk.

Last week saw me feeling the same once more, tempered this time by the complication of having invested time and money so heavily in editing. Sometimes I read what I have done and think, “This is okay.” But then I read again and just think, “This is utter rubbish.”

Writing is such a strange hobby. Both therapeutic and extremely painful. If only I had taken up watercolours instead. I wonder… is the agitation within some kind of sign… to just quit… give up?