Writing is a circular inferno...

My site name has been simmering under the surface for sometime. 

For those that have never read Dante's 'The Divine Comedy', hell/inferno is talked about as being a place of ever decreasing circles of torment.  Anyone who pretends to be a writer like yours truly, naturally propels themselves into a similar state, and to be honest any creative endeavour in general has several levels of torture upon which one can grind oneself.    

The first circle of hell for Dante was Limbo.  The poor souls here were not punished exactly, more kind of lost in a strange sad state where they knew something had gone wrong with their lives but they were at a loss to fix it.  This is the place all writers find themselves when they have burningly brilliant ideas for their work, but sadly no time in their days to actually sit down and get them out onto paper.  Thank gods I have descended (in the inferno we always go down not up) from that horrible place, as now I MAKE time to write, at the expense of the overflowing washing basket and wilderness garden (its better for the bees anyway). 

No - I am past all that and currently abiding in the painful 5^th circle of writing hell, the pit for those tormented souls that are faced with the ordeal of multiple rewrites on a piece of work previously thought of as 'quite good', and now upon advice from others is revealed to be 'quite pants'.

There is no anguish like cutting and dumping large chunks of painstaking work - it's good, you know its good but it just isn't right.  I am currently trying to make myself cut and rewrite the first two chapters to a paranormal novel series I have going on but I can't bring myself to do it just yet.  It just took so long to get it down on paper the first time my brain goes numb in horror when I try and think about changing it.  Of course I can see it needs doing, that section no longer fits with how the book has developed, but golly it's hard going.

            Oh well at least I have the virtue of being one of those writers who has other projects going on as I can shy away from this for now and work on some feature articles and short stories I am submitting - also I am a keen painter and have some artwork in the pipeline - busy busy!

Will get back to you in a while with my first ramblings on a subject of my whimsy - an idea is forming about an article on Manuscript Critique, I did this professionally for a while and maybe if I am feeling generous some experience shall be imparted here for free. Maybe.