Struggling to Stay Awake in the Haze

Jean Emile Laboureur, Lassitude, 1912. Public domain image courtesy Bibliothèque nationale de France and Wikimedia Commons. Maybe every writer hits a point in a project where everything feels useless, your efforts stale and stupid. Where any energy you have, period, falls away and leaves brain and heart, soul and limbs feeling suffused with viscous lead. That’s where I’m at right now, where I’ve been for the last few days. Torpor, lassitude, call it what you will: I haven’t managed to maintain interest in or pay attention to anything for more than a few minutes at a time, in spite of my constant background hunger to read all the books and write some of my own. Part of the pervasive sluggishness surely has to do with some misplaced discouragement about a manuscript—or rather, lack of communication about where it is in the editorial queue. When am I supposed to hear anything about next steps; what should I be doing until then; has the editor really been trying to get in touch with me…