Having a serious case of self loathing today. I hate everything that I write and I write things I hate. It is a vicious cycle. I have stopped and restarted the same spot a million times and come up with the same block. I move on and then think I am ready to come back to gaping hole in my story and find out that I am definately NOT ready to do that. There is much to learn and much to do to make myself want to write any further. How do other people get past the wanting to give up? I go through the I'm not good enough and no one wants to read my thoughts anyway. Then, I find out differently and it makes me inspired to try all over again. I just have to find a way to be able to pull myself out of the funk rather than relying on others to do it for me.

I have encountered one of the most difficult times in my writing. Never before has my real life bled over into a story that I have been working on. Granted, sometimes my stories are bits and pieces of things that have happened to me or something that I have experienced, or maybe a dream that I have had and then I work on how that would all play out. But, now things just got a little too clsoe to home. My current project includes two friends that learn to navigate life together. It is a testiment to true love and it is a testiment to true sisterhood. Although the book has been outlined for quite some time, it has come to the part where one character finds out that an affair has become part of their lives. Now, enter my real life. My husband and I have been together for 16 years. In those 16 years there was a couple that was so close to us that in the beginning we were all dirt poor and lived together and had probabley the best times of our lives. This is the couple that we have vacationed with yearly. This is the couple that I am blood related to the wife and the husband has been my husband's best friend since middle school. We all met at the same time. We are all part of this incredible love story that is better than fiction. And now, it is all ruined. I found out that the husband.... he has been having an affair for the past five years. For the past five years, the man that I thought I knew; the man that I truely believed to be a great person; the man that I was proud my husband was with... is not the man I knew at all. Not only has he been cheating... But, he straight up left his wife and moved in with another woman. I feel like I am getting a divorce. I don't understand. This isn't my marriage. Yet, I feel like I have been cheated on. I feel like I have been let down. I can help her pick up the pieces. I can be vindictive when she needs me to be strong. I can help with her children. But can I get over the feeling of betrayal? Can I stand it if my husband has to never see him again? How does one get over this? How can I find the strength to write about it? Does that make the topic and characters even more real? Is it better to let the raw emotion come right out on to the page or is it better to write that emotion into your current work? I am stumped. I am heartbroken. I am wounded.

Advice Giver

A student has begged me to read his writing and give him honest feedback on what I think. I knew before reading it that it was graphic, horrorific, and that his parents knew he was writing this as fiction. I also want to preface this with saying that I have watch every SAW movie out, so I am not sensitive to gore. However, I was overwhelmed because there was mutilation of babies.... Maybe that is where I draw the line. I gave feedback on the paper and even crossed a section out that even I felt could be literary taboo. I am afraid I might crush this new writer. I never wanted people to read my work because I hated the criticism. I did like some of his sentences. They were eloquent and they were meaningful and his story was wonderful because I could feel the pain that was haunting this student. But how much is too much in literature and where our world has gone today? Are there any subjects that are off limits? Or, have we gotten to the point that every new story has to overtake the last and be more shocking? How much is too much? That is my question and I would love to hear what all you others have to think, especially with the idea of free speech being front and center.