I am, at moment suffering from what I call ‘bad stress’ – where you’re worrying a lot. Now, even if you’re Marvin the paranoid android, with a brain the size of planet, worries (and paranoia, and depression) seem expand to fill all the available space there is in the great thinking machine. And, well any half-way decent piece of writing expands to fill the every bit of the brain that isn’t taken up in the essentials like emptying the kitty litter, or breathing (or if you fail to do the former, both). So that processing space is in major competition with all the other competing demands on it, because writing (and I don’t care who you are, or what you write) is a mono-focus job if you’re going to do it well. If money, or politics, or your relationship or whatever creeps up and mugs the writing and steals its space, you really can’t do it well.

It’s a right royal nuisance, especially when being able to focus and write would ease the problem. So often – dealing with Trad publishers, I have had what I call ‘unnecessary bad stress’ simply because they’re too chaotic, unworried-by-the-problems-of-replacable-widget AKA ‘author’ to fulfill their obligations properly and timeously. You’re waiting to get paid/get copies/ etc. Checking your account 5 times a day, because it is too much like hard work for them to drop you an e-mail to say they’ve paid you that 4 months late money. I’ve lost years of productivity to that. And if I had any message for trad publishing it would be that just communicating, fulfilling their contractual and normal courtesy obligations properly would keep a lot of people out of indie, and would improve the quality and productivity of their widgets. Heh. But maybe it’s easier to whine about Amazon than pay very small amounts on time and let the widget know what the release date is.

But I’ve found an absence of any stress just about as unproductive.

What I call ‘Good stress’ stops the digressions. A book wanting to get out of my head so badly badly it has devised a lock-pick from bits of dried sensitivity and is fiddling with the lock to the top of my head, a deadline looming, an exciting competition, nanomo, a ‘prize’ in the sense of welcome but not desperately needed money, eager fans nagging… I’m the world champion Olympic solid platinum triple award procrastinator, but good stress can make me into an energizer bunny.

Australia has a Bowel Cancer screening program (for which I am very grateful) and they picked some positives in Barbs (my far better half) sample, so she is having a colonoscopy today. I’ve had bad stress for a while and today she has her endoscopy, so I am due to fly over to Launceston and collect her from the unit, and bring her back to the Island tomorrow. All-in-all a very expensive exercise, but knowing is better than worrying.

And worrying is taking too much processing for me to write more, right now.

Update: Yes. We had polyps. We now wait on histology.