As I sit here, watching Monster Quest on Netflix (final episode of season 1), and try to gather up enough energy to work on rewriting chapter 2 of Don't Look, while at the same time thinking of the second book in what is now becoming a series, I find my mind turning to my body.
Or rather, the pain that I am experiencing and how it affects me and my day to day life.
What kind of pain though? It's chronic joint pain. A lot of it centers around my joints but can expand into the rest of my body depending on day and what I'm doing. Most days I can just ignore it just fine, but some days, it's like every piece of me is being attacked by razor sharp, heated needles aimed straight for the muscles and nerves.
When it's like that, it makes it hard to stand or walk. Hell, it makes it hard to just sit in a recliner with comfortable pillows to sink back into. And that's saying something. I could be laying on an air mattress (which are really comfortable, much more so than say, water beds or gel beds) and still be hurting.
It's debilitating. It really is.
But it also affects my writing along with what I can do in that day. I can only hold my writing positions for a short time which means that I get few words in a short period of time before I'm forced to find a more comfortable position. Which usually includes me leaning back in my chair with a heating pad turned on against the body part that is currently in pain.
A lot of writers that I've met have physical problems that restrict them in some way. Some are internal, while others are external. But when they get bad, writing tends to slow down or stop while the writer who is dealing with it allows it to stop or works to get it to stop.
I can attest that writing while in pain is not fun, and I can get really grumpy when people sit there and try to make me write when I'm dealing with it. Usually before I take something to help kill the pain and relax my muscles, but that usually leave me either high (because, hey! No pain! Yay!) or just foggy.
I don't enjoy having to rewrite what I wrote in those states because they tend to not make very much sense at all.
There is a reason why most of the writers who have physical problems tend to have a back-log of stories to be published, cause there is every chance that a disability will stop a writer in their tracks while writing a new story. It is never good and those who are indies can lose their readers if they don't have a certain amount of stories coming out yearly.
Which cuts into what little money they get from something that they can enjoy.
I just hope that whoever reads a story and is waiting patiently for a writer with a disability or physical limitation to understand that these things are not excuses for us. We are very unhappy when we can't do what we want to do when something happens. And we always hope that our readers are willing to understand that this happens sometimes and that we will have more coming to them soon enough.
