The Fragile Process Of Writing

When I sit down to write I need to be comfortable. My bum is not allowed to hurt. I mustn't feel the need to pee. Water should be within reach. Sometimes a little snack can't hurt either. The air should be fine. The music should be in tune either. This way I can set off and write whatever I feel like at the moment: fluff, angst, blog, ... possibly smut. Anything!

It's wonderful. I love it! However, this week something awful happened ... Something terrible. Life ruining.

I got a cold.

You see, I am never sick. The last time I was sick was in October last year. The time before that? September 2014. Now, that's quite lovely. But both of those times I was seriously sick with fever, and things coming out where they shouldn't.

A cold is a stupid sickness as well. I often refuse to call it a sickness at all because it's so stupid. After all, you can't call in sick from work because of it. You only have a snotty nose, and cough a few times. Even more so, who the fuck gets a cold in the middle of summer?

Well, me, the fuck. As it turns out six hours in a very thoroughly air-conditioned train and getting soaked to the skin two days earlier don't go well hand in hand. How about that ...

But the worst thing is that it throws me out of my wonderful comfort zone that I work hard on establishing when I write. This means that I can't write properly, which kills me!
During my holiday, I had collected so many ideas and found so much inspiration that I wanted to work into a story. Can I do it now?
Well, I tried. I really did. But then I coughed and had clean my nose and ... where was I?

Getting into that comfort zone is hard enough as it is. Catch me at the wrong moment and I will rip your head off, or deny your whole existence.
But it doesn't help that every time I am anywhere near that wonderful place where I am in the story, and reminding myself not to write "tight" when I mean "thigh," debating internally if I should use "pastry" or "cake," replace nouns with WHATEVER when I can't remember what they're called but I don't want to be kicked out of the flow, and that everything is correctly spelled because I turned the spell checker off since it's distracting me. Then - of course - I coughed. More than once. I have to start all over again. It's annoying. It makes my skin itch. I makes me wonder why ... sorry, I had to clean my nose there.

Obviously, not being able to write, I had occupy myself differently ...

I finished The Raven Boys which is a good book, and you can happily cough your lungs out while reading it. Then I drew a tiny bouquette of roses into my diary, petted the cat. Began to question to meaning of life. Gingerly drank ginger tea. Thought of that joke. And I drew some Amsterdam:

I did the colours