I’ve decided there’s a little dragon on my left shoulder.
And no, I have not become quite suddenly delusional.
This little dragon perches up there, relatively dormant – until something happens.
A sniffle.
Suddenly little dragon is a great, huge, ROARING dragon – “Oh, was that a sniffle? You better stay home from work today, that’s a good idea.”
A sigh.
“Oh wow, you must be awfully sad. You better watch episodes of Prison Break until your eyeballs fall out.”
A stall in the writing.
“Hm, that’s a huge hurdle, you’re never getting over that. You really better just take a 15 hour nap.”
I like my dragon. I might like my dragon too much to slay it.
My dragon says exactly what I want to hear, when I want to hear it. I call the dragon George, for absolutely no reason other than it sounded like an appropriate dragon name.
It’s true name, I’m quite sure, is laziness.
Do you have a dragon that roars fire at you and at the same time offers everything you want?
How do you slay your dragon?
One of the things I like to do when I go through periods of laziness in my writing is simply read well-written, gentle books. I just picked up a Richard Brautigan collection from the library today. Brautigan was a writer from the 1960s and 1970s who wrote poetry and short fiction that reads like a walk in the park with the gentle breeze blowing through your hair. I just did a post on him, if you want to check him out.
Because really, you don’t have to slay your dragon. You just have to imagine something else.