Dam's a'Burstin'

The other day I wrote about being completely blocked up when it came to finishing my feature on Radical Entertainment's 20th anniversary -- I've posted Part I! Read it! -- but on Sunday night, the damn burst.

As fast as I could type, the words poured onto the page, I cut and pasted quotes from the interviews I conducted, and screenshots and pictures materialized -- and it all stitched together. To be sure, there's still some fine tuning involved but it doesn't feel like I should tear the articles apart and start again, which is what I was encountering previously.

Even the capstone -- my little post script where "I" appears -- tumbled off my fingers.

Were the words there all along and they just needed time to percolate in my brain long enough to form into something coherent? Something good? Like sausages? The component parts don't always make sense but grind it all together and fry it with some onions... that's makes for good eating. Or reading, in this case.

That's my hope at least.

I mean, I like reading it. Onions or not.

Against the Clock

For the last couple of months I've been focusing a great deal of my attention on writing a feature on Radical Entertainment's 20 year history. Everything was coming together, despite the lack of any involvement whatsoever of co-founders Ian Wilkinson and Rory Armes, and I felt really good about the whole thing. But something has lodged a Godzilla-sized block in my writing brain.

I've gutted and re-written the feature a few times now but that hasn't deterred me from continuing -- writing through it, sifting the interviews, sorting the facts, etc.

But this is writer's block on a scale that I've only encountered one other time. I was 14 and desperately scrabbling for a satisfying ending to a short story that jumped around like a flea on meth. No matter how many plot lines I ran down, it never came together the way I wanted it to. There was always something that could have, should have, been better. Which is kind of what I think is happening to me right now. I'm not sure if it will ever be good enough.

I imposed a deadline of early March to get the feature posted. And it's early March now and the feature still doesn't seem presentable.

Maybe part of my problem is that a certain level of panic has set in -- and that's a very bad thing. Writing under pressure is one thing, writing in panic is another. I can handle the pressure aspect but the panic... it's a killer.

Even with all that sitting in the back of my head, I'm inexplicably optimistic that it will all come together! It's an emotional roller coaster! You can bet that when I'm "finished" I'll be doing cartwheels. And maybe I'll have just the slightest taste of bile in the back my mouth.